00:14:39 · James Wise, Alan Chang
[00:14:39] S1: And then, you know, you've spoken a little bit about Fuze's vertical integration. Can talk you to us a little bit about the kind of products that you're excited by that Fuze Energy customers could have access to that you think will be continue to be transformative to either the bills or the experience of a customer going forward? [00:14:59] S0: Yeah. So probably one of the products I'm most excited about which we're launching next year is a micro solar and battery solution, right? So if you think about traditionally solar and battery is quite inaccessible in, you know, both in terms of capital, right? You need to have over 10, even if your finances are quite high cost. Or you need to own your own roof, which a lot of people do not. So we're basically building this product where even if you're renting, you can literally plug in the socket and you can get you can hang a solar off your balcony or if you're lucky enough to have a backyard, a backyard. And it just works, right? And the fully loaded cost will be under $2. And yeah, it's and with financial payback of like roughly three years. So we think this is going to be very transformative to a lot of people. Right? And at the same time, providing a very, very good customer experience.
00:14:59 · Alan Chang, James Wise
[00:14:59] S0: Yeah. So probably one of the products I'm most excited about which we're launching next year is a micro solar and battery solution, right? So if you think about traditionally solar and battery is quite inaccessible in, you know, both in terms of capital, right? You need to have over 10, even if your finances are quite high cost. Or you need to own your own roof, which a lot of people do not. So we're basically building this product where even if you're renting, you can literally plug in the socket and you can get you can hang a solar off your balcony or if you're lucky enough to have a backyard, a backyard. And it just works, right? And the fully loaded cost will be under $2. And yeah, it's and with financial payback of like roughly three years. So we think this is going to be very transformative to a lot of people. Right? And at the same time, providing a very, very good customer experience. [00:16:04] S1: Mhmm. And batteries are needed for loads of different reasons, but but part of it is, you know, the grid is changing. As you say, renewables introduce some advantages, but they do also introduce volatility into the grid. Can consumers solve this? Is this something which you and I, by having batteries at home or solar, can really have an impact on? Or do you think really, to fix some of the energy problems we have in The UK and beyond today, there needs to be sort of grid level innovation as well?
00:16:35 · Alan Chang
[00:16:35] S0: I think the answer is both, right? So, I think a lot of people underestimate the power of the consumer, But consumers domestic properties represent roughly 40% of the power economy. That's quite big, right? More than most people think, right? Now obviously, industrial sector is a bit larger, but 40% is no small feat. And at the same time, we're seeing huge inefficiencies in the grid. So UK grid is actually a prime example of inefficiency. So if you look at how power is generated and distributed in The UK, we have loads of wind in Scotland that gets paid to turn off, And that power is not flowing through to where demand centres are, like key cities like Manchester and London. Instead we rely we at the same time tell the wind turbines to turn off, pay them to turn off, and then pay additional peaker plants to turn on to power cities. Insane, right? And that's one of the reasons why the power prices in The UK are so high, right? And if you can find a way to coordinate supply and demand better on a regional level, what you can do is basically use more of that wind power in Scotland without wasting it and therefore, A, reduce wastage B, reduce the cost we pay wind turbines to turn off and also reduce peaker plants being turned off, right? So this can if you're able to coordinate this supply and demand on a regional level much better, we can actually not only reduce energy costs for people who participate in this coordination, but also reduce the system level cost for everyone else, including ones that are not participating. Now obviously, another part of the solution is actually reinforce the grid where it's needed. The issue with the current grid is the grid operators are not very sophisticated, and it requires a new level of, know, I'll say software modelling that wasn't a requirement before. That also needs to happen.
00:19:13 · James Wise
[00:19:13] S1: You know, you've mentioned some of the challenges of the grid. One of the new challenges that's arisen over the last couple of years clearly is consumption of energy for AI and the need to feed and scale data centers. What role do you think data center's gonna play on the grid going forward? And is there something that Fuse can do there to support us to use more AI?
00:19:35 · Alan Chang
[00:19:35] S0: Yeah, 100%. So, maybe I can first give some background on the state of the grid before and off previously and today, right, and how that's going to evolve. So if you look back maybe more than twenty five years ago, right, of how grid operated, it's actually very simple, right? You have one large very, very large coal plant that can serve millions of homes or hundreds of thousands of businesses, and you send power along this very, very long cable. And if there's any fluctuating demand from temperature, for example, you can rev up the engine on the coal plant or you can rev it down, right? Very, very simple to manage. In fact, you can actually manage on a spreadsheet, right? Now fast forward to today, we've decommissioned a lot of coal, replaced it with solar and wind, which is very intermittent, very weather driven, right? So in order to understand solar and wind production, you really, really need to understand weather forecasting. And this is like a data science and meteorology problem. And also, this is very disputed, right? So coal plants are very concentrated, and usually build it co located with coal mines, right? Whereas, solar and wind, very, very distributed at very micro scale to utility scale. So your energy generation and storage is hyper local, distributed around the grid. And then you have on the demand side, you have electrification AI, right? So electrification, for example, the biggest one is EVs, right? So an EV consumes roughly the same amount of energy as one small house, So if you think about, let's say the domestic market is roughly 40% of the power economy, and if everyone gets an EV, you're basically increasing to 80%. Then problem is that everyone plugs in the EV after work, right? So you have 40% up to 40% spike in energy demand right after work. And then you have AI, right? So AI, for example, during pre training or inference, right, there is intermittent energy demand as well. Right? So for example, GPU is not always doing work. So you have this energy load variance, which is also distributed, right? So you're not building data centers concentrated in just around cities, right? You're also building data centers in the middle of nowhere, right? So you have more distributed generation, more distributed demand, more volatile generation, more volatile demand. So it becomes very, very hard to manage. Right?
00:22:25 · Alan Chang, James Wise
Because the basic objective for the grid is to manage supply and demand, But you have to do it on a local level, not on a national level, on a local level. It's very, very hard to do it and requires very, very high level of sophistication on software, data science, meteorology, and etcetera. Right? So... And you have this AI, obviously, you know, demand skyrocketing. Right? So right now, it's low single digit percentage of the energy economy. You know, we can... There's... You know, depending on who you ask, it could be, you know, more than a 100% of the energy economy. Right? And There are some 20 [00:23:08] S1: forecasts out there. [00:23:09] S0: Yeah. Like, the the... Also, the forecast range is, like, massive. Right? So reality is no one really knows what is the true future, true demand of AI. But I think everyone can agree on it's gonna be much higher. We just don't know how much higher. [00:23:21] S1: I mean, Grok have just opened the first gigawatt scale data center. [00:23:24] S0: Right. [00:23:25] S1: And they're just getting going.