The Nichole Wischoff Podcast
00:51:10 · Alan Chang, Nichole Wischoff
[00:51:10] S1: We have a very small office in New York. That's correct. [00:51:13] S0: Okay. Fair enough. Got it. I know you, mentioned in your 2026 just sort of roadmap to expand into both Ireland, The US and Spain. Maybe walk us through those plans. And is it a similar offering? Because I know there'll be a ton of work to do in each market from like a regulatory perspective, a go to market perspective. [00:51:32] S1: Yeah. Very, very similar road map building a full stack energy company in every market we go to. [00:51:37] S0: Yep. And let's double click into what I think is fascinating, but the the network that you're building right now. I think you just announced that as a part of your plans, should be amazing to help scale the grid. But what is the energy network? [00:51:51] S1: Yeah. So let's solve the problem we're trying to solve. So globally, there's roughly $12,000,000,000 worth of renewable energy being wasted every single year. And this is excluding payments. Renewable owners get paid to switch off, right? So
00:51:51 · Alan Chang, Nichole Wischoff
[00:51:51] S1: Yeah. So let's solve the problem we're trying to solve. So globally, there's roughly $12,000,000,000 worth of renewable energy being wasted every single year. And this is excluding payments. Renewable owners get paid to switch off, right? So [00:52:15] S0: Shout out to our partner public.com, the investing platform built for people who take it seriously. On public.com, you can build a long term multi asset portfolio across stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and more all in one place. They offer advanced tools like generated assets, which lets you turn almost any idea into an investable index using AI, plus tax efficient direct indexing for long term investors. Whether you're trading options with rebates, earning income through your yield accounts, or automating your strategy with their actively trading API, Public gives you the tools to invest the way you want. And right now, you can also earn an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your portfolio from another brokerage. Check out public.com, link in the show notes.
00:53:01 · Alan Chang
[00:53:01] S1: The first concept we need to understand is basically electricity is not the same across time and space. Right? So for example, let's start with time. Setting the obvious. If let's say wind is blowing, the sun is shining, but no one's using power, this power just gets wasted, right? And if people or businesses start using power when the sun is not shining, wind is not blowing, then you need to rely on gas turbines, right? So there's basically a time mismatch, right, between usage. The second is location, right? Obviously, if you generate power miles and miles and miles away, where the demand is, it's not gonna get to where the demand is. And there's also, you have to also consider grid congestion, right? So in the old days of how we generate and consume power, we basically used to have big coal plants that can serve millions of homes or millions of businesses right, from a single power plant. And the coal plant really works kind of like a combustion engine, right? You can rev up the engine when the demand is higher, you can rev down the engine when demand is lower. It's a pretty simple system. But now as we decommission coal plants and replace them with renewables, you can't do that anymore, right? So the characteristic of renewables is obviously intermittent, but also it's distributed, right? So it's no longer in a single source, it has multiple, multiple, multiple sources, right? Even at utility scale, we used to have like 10, 100 gigs of concentrated power generation, but we're now a very distributed megawatt generation storage, right, across the country. So effectively what you need is effectively what the industry called demand response. But effectively a control system, right? Where on demand side you basically modulate demand up and down in order to effectively balance with generation. And all the times you try and match supply and demand, right? So when there's more supply you want more demand, and when there's less supply you want less demand, right? And we wanna do it in a way that doesn't really affect customer experience, right? Because obviously like when I wanna use power, like I wanna cook, wanna turn on lights, I want to be able to do that, right? So this is basically the challenge of trying to match supply and demand without affecting customer experience. So our way of solving is basically using smart devices.
00:55:52 · Alan Chang
And actually a lot of people have smart devices at home already. So you can think of EV chargers, batteries or smart thermostats as some examples of smart devices. And what users can do is basically effectively connect those smart devices to fuse, so to the energy network, and basically programmatically control when those devices use energy with user experience as a constraint, right? So let's get this, let's do a worked example. So let's take EV charging, right? Most people, all they care about is they want their car, let's say 80% charged by 8AM in the morning because they need to get to work. What they don't care about is when exactly the car is charged. So let's say they come home from work at 05:30 p. M, they plug it in, right? They don't care whether it's charged at 05:30 or midnight, As long as the car is charged by 80% at 08:00 tomorrow before work. So what we do is we basically, the customer can add an EV charger to the Fuse app. And basically we programmatically control charging, and charge when it's cheap and when the grid is not congested and stop charging when the grid is congested and use it to help balance supply and demand on the grid. And if you aggregate enough homes, enough people to do it, it can have a pretty significant impact on the grid and alleviate a lot of grid stress.
00:57:29 · Nichole Wischoff, Alan Chang
[00:57:29] S0: Yep. That... No. That makes perfect sense. I would love to have that now. So, you know, let me know when you're here. We're... We got a Tesla in the garage. I think everyone does in California. No. I... That makes sense. I think I I spent some time actually on Austin. I'm not sure if you've looked at base power, which is, like, super, super interesting giving batteries to homeowners and saving on costs and trying to do something similar from that perspective. But the regulatory dynamics here are obviously different depending on the market. So whether you're in Texas, which is obviously easier to navigate, or Tennessee TVA is a huge pain, which you'll learn, you know, once you you start tackling that. But in terms of the network itself and opting in, where does this energy network start? Are you starting that specifically in in The UK first, and will that scale later, or is that something that's all... You also plan to roll out? [00:58:14] S1: Exactly right. So right now, we have a closed beta where we have a couple thousand people on beta. And we're already seeing some results in energy being shifted. But yeah, that's the idea. We will also scale the energy network as we expand to more international markets.
00:58:14 · Alan Chang, Nichole Wischoff
[00:58:14] S1: Exactly right. So right now, we have a closed beta where we have a couple thousand people on beta. And we're already seeing some results in energy being shifted. But yeah, that's the idea. We will also scale the energy network as we expand to more international markets. [00:58:34] S0: Yeah. On the... Maybe a naive question, but just let me... Like, just educate me. So right now... And I know this more from sort of, like, the data center scaling and needing, like, obviously, like, these need to be, like, 100 megawatt to 500 megawatt projects. Getting the power for that has been really, really hard. Some people think there's still... There's some... I think 15% of the grid in The US is still idle, so you could try and find it. But in a lot of cases, folks are just defaulting to nat gas. So, like, Elon's doing that in Memphis. And then, obviously, renewables need to be a part of the future. Do you think it's the case that we'll get to that place? Like, are you guys only focused on, you know, like, the solar and you got the turbines and all of that? Like, is there a world where you're... Like, I feel like it's just gonna take a really, really long time, like, to be a 100% renewable. Not that that's your thesis, but, like, what do you think? [00:59:24] S1: Yeah. So it's a great question, actually. So, yeah. So as you pointed out there's a lot of AI labs that couldn't wait for the grid and the fact that you're building your own power plants behind the meter. And natural gas turbines is right now the best choice. [00:59:43] S0: Yep.