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0:10 building a thunder lizard starts here learn more at energy tech Nexus dot com welcome back to the show I'm here today with robert roll neck he's the CEO of a wind everest is an energy insights company

0:23 that activates consumers to make minor adjustments in their energy use to get maximum climate impact robert tell us what that actually means in practice so I'm building an app that allows people who

0:36 drive electric cars because they are rapidly becoming one of the largest flexible batteries available to the grid and I'm informing them with simple weather reports just like you might get on TV that

0:50 instead of the rain and reporting on megawatts that are coming from wind turbines and importantly because no one understands what a Megawatt Is I break it down into letter grades. So it's a letter

1:02 grade A through F. A grades indicate that it's a particularly strong whether white or wind and F means that it's a fuel night. And for those of people who are driving electric cars often they want

1:15 to avoid burning something to propel their car. So some of it is using the weather to look at carbon intensity, not just price. It is chiefly focused on the carbon intensity, but oftentimes these

1:28 things move hand-in-hand. When the carbon intensity drops, you're gonna have prices that get down pretty low. Sometimes to negative prices, if you have a subsidy at work.

1:40 And when you, so you got into this because you are a strong advocate for EVs, right? So how did you stumble upon this as a

1:49 real challenge for you? So I got wind of this way back in 2018, not long after Hurricane Harvey came through here.

1:59 And I was using a service called Gritty, which is a retail electric service that we have here in many parts of Texas. Unlike other states, Texas is deregulated and so you have enormous competition

2:11 for selling electricity. Gritty had a very unique business model where they reported your electricity on a five minute by five minute basis, price changing at that granular level. And of course, I

2:24 noticed that as two o'clock rolled around in the morning, the prices got to be rock bottom, even to negative prices. And so this is really the fundamental pricing mechanism by which the entire

2:36 ERCOT grid operates. And knowing that this was something that correlated with the strong winds and decarbonization, I thought that I should step in, particularly since Gritty is now no longer in

2:48 existence and that business model has been outlawed. Oh, wait, wait. So you said two big things there So first of all, explain why that's - how price of power can go negative, like what's really

2:60 going on in the background of this deregulated market. So electric generators are put on the grid and something called the merit order dispatch effect. In other words, you will basically take bids

3:12 from electricity providers. The cheapest one is sent to the grid first. The next most expensive one goes next and so on and so forth. The most expensive of these electricity providers tends to be

3:24 coal You have to mine out of the ground and then just put away the

3:32 waste afterwards. Has a certain extra cost and so what happens is you have wind turbines and solar both being pretty much zero cost. There's no fuel involved. You have operations and maintenance

3:44 costs and so they are the cheapest and therefore they get dispatched first but at times demand is not there And so that, that, because there's too much supply essentially, not enough demand.

3:57 market signal is for there to be a negative price. But we don't necessarily see that as consumers, right? Like that's really just something that happens within the ERCOT system. So how does that

4:07 leap happen to where you are working with the app? So the pricing mechanism is rather opaque to people who drive cars or maybe only the people in commercial settings are actually exposed to that

4:20 since the Texas legislature outlawed that business model So what I do is I try to make this a much more visible signal by producing an app that you can look at for a few seconds as you pull your car

4:32 into the garage and you just digest, is it an A-night, B-night, and on down the line. The F-nights at the wholesale price level will be more expensive and the A-nights at the wholesale price level

4:44 will be free or even just giving you money to take the electricity. Yeah. And you said something, so you said the old business model of Gridley was outlawed What happened there was that because of.

4:56 It wasn't Harvey, but one of these storms. Yes, yes. I think it was about 2018, 2019. Winter storm Yuri came through and knocked out power. There was rolling blackouts. I suffered from 24

5:10 hours of blackout, and actually I found out later that I was lucky. If you go to Austin, they had sometimes three days without power in these zero degrees of temperature. So long story short,

5:22 what happened is the wholesale price went up to the absolute maximum allowed by law, which is9 a kilowatt hour, which is brutal compared to what it normally is. And so everybody that was on the

5:33 gritty network, they were urged, first off, you should switch carriers right away, right away. And then if you didn't, you'd be stuck with basically9 per kilowatt hour, which is, you know,

5:44 you surprise, you've got a2, 000 electricity bill. Yeah. And so I guess because that damaged too many consumers, that why they they outlawed that in Texas. Yes, I think people just were caught

5:58 flat-footed, and I think it made national news, that people had these ridiculous bills on top of also having a recent power cut. Yeah. What are your views on, how do you manage that? I mean,

6:10 obviously you're creating your app that helps consumers who are using EVs know when to charge, but in terms of

6:20 that business model and like giving flexible pricing to consumers, and giving that transparency to consumers really on what's,

6:31 whether the electricity that they're using is renewables or not. So my instinct is to try to become the next Fahrenheit or Celsius, just create a simple scale that people can get. Now, because the

6:47 grid is constantly adding new wind turbines all the time, and each grid's created a little bit differently. We're a little bit different than the grid that serves Illinois, from the grid that

6:56 serves Minnesota. So what I've done is I've basically produced these grades to adjust according to the season and according to how many wind turbines are on the grid so that everybody is on a level

7:09 playing field. And A is just as difficult to get in Illinois as is in Texas. There will be different concentrations of carbon in each instance, but now people have a signal to suggest when is gonna

7:22 be the least carbon impact or charging their cars. And I think,

7:30 well, there are two questions here that are kind of linked. So one, what's your monetization strategy?

7:38 And yeah, so how do people pay you? So I've got basically two different approaches I can make. And at first I'm just going to try to develop an audience of say a thousand electric car drivers,

7:53 which I think of as one of 11 different verticals. But this vertical pairs nicely with the retail electric providers that we have selling electricity to each of these drivers. And so what I'm doing

8:05 is I'm basically encouraging a broad swath of consumers to reduce their carbon intensity and take power when it's the cheapest for the retail electric providers to give out. In other words, this

8:16 drops the bottom line for retail electric providers because their feedstock is basically the wholesale price of electricity So my initial approach is going to be to pair up with two or three, maybe

8:28 pilots at the retail electric level, have them give me a cut of the action since I'm perhaps saving them3 to8

8:40 a month, maybe save050 per month per driver. It depends also on how well they coordinate with the wind. So that is my first approach. Okay. And you said it was the second approach. Yeah You know,

8:52 I've really scoped out this market. electric cars are not the only game in town in terms of flexible loads. There are people who have batteries that back up their houses. You have commercial fleets

9:05 of delivery trucks such as the Amazon delivery trucks. There's UPS. Sometimes airports have ground crews that are operating on electric-powered luggage carts and what have you. So that's my

9:17 business-to-business approach I would approach them and unlike the residential consumers, they are not prohibited from negotiating and getting prices at the wholesale overall of electricity. So I

9:29 give them my heads up that in effect for them, your price is going down. You might not care or you maybe as a corporate citizen, maybe they do care about the carbon intensity. But one thing that's

9:40 universal is they don't want to reduce the cost on the bottom line. And that's my second approach

9:48 Tell us a little bit about your background and how that's kind of well suited for you really understand his problem and then create the solution Yeah so I started my career in the telecom industry as

9:59 an engineer I I worked for Motorola as a cellular

10:05 a sales engineer basically when the country needed to deploy it's cellular systems and this was back in the eighties when cellular systems were just coming online they needed yo deployment they needed

10:17 to be rapid you didn't want to have any holes so I made sure they had the right collection of equipment from the stock of different boxes that Motorola sold on the infrastructure side so I had a deep

10:30 knowledge from working at Motorola also as a system test engineer how do you assemble large systems that are rather complex and have a lot of communication requirements I completed my law degree while

10:43 was working up there in Chicago and then went on to become a patent attorney working for Nokia were in House I was harvesting a lot of inventions and getting those to the patent office through outside

10:53 counsel. And then later I became basically a startup founder by running my own law firm as a patent attorney. And since then, I was segwaying into doing investing basically full time, which I'm

11:09 pretty good at, but

11:12 I kind of missed writing software and getting into the mix of things. So I had to jump back in and this is just such a ripe area and very few people understand things at a system level. I thought

11:23 I'd take the chance. This is perhaps many years in the making kind of thing that requires a significant ramp up in electric cars. I have the ability to wait out that period while the electric cars

11:34 are coming online here in the Midwest and the Great Plains. I'm very curious what software you were programming in in the early days versus now. Well, gosh darn it, I'm trying to think,

11:47 rare, really niche software called Erlang or something like that. It wasn't even something well known. I did some C language programming way back. Every time that I've run into patents that have

12:01 assembly code, which is very challenging to read. But yeah, I mean, once you know how to write a few languages, all the rest are easy. Interesting. And so when you were building the website,

12:14 so you're coding your app yourself. You're not that phase anymore. I'm really trying to do the CEO founder, the guy that's the glue that holds it all together. And so I just I'd like to be able to

12:28 do that, but I'm spending so much time doing outreach, doing social media, attending talking events. I was trying to get the word out. You know, I'm active in about five different electric

12:41 vehicle and renewable energy groups and clubs. So I'm just I've become a little bit of, you know, the guy with the red hat and red tail coat, just trying to get everybody active and interested to

12:57 come to the circus. Yeah. Yeah. And that's super interesting. Like, yeah, talk to that strategy that you're using, you know, to kind of actually build this business. Is your goal to, like,

13:09 get as many consumers

13:12 of this app as you can, and then you start working on, like, the other side of the business model? So I see the next six months as accomplishing three steps. One, I'd like to get a good steady

13:26 ramp up in individual car owners signing up and trying it out and telling me what's broken and what needs fixing. Get into that iterative note mode where I literally have a product available Next is

13:40 to reach out to

13:43 the other side of things where I'm. while lowering the bottom line for the sale of electricity and in this phase my customers can get thrown in with their customers if they can single out which ones

13:56 drive electric cars and then they're all introduced in sort of a pilot program to a wouldn't you like to have maybe a buck or two off your bill each month and then the next stage after that is perhaps

14:09 approach some of these other verticals like I said the commercial delivery trucks they want to reduce their costs or they're already very green I mean let's face it if you're Amazon and you have all

14:20 these electric trucks you've kind of got that nailed now the next phase is to if you can use that as a tool to amplify the months of renewables on the grid I'M going to enter but not ones but auto has

14:33 a tesla when are you going to try the app

14:36 you know and I I found out from robert that the best time to charge your car is at two am since I started doing right away You see app yet, but - Wait, how do you time the charging for your - You

14:50 just, yeah, you can automate that. Oh, wow. Yeah, you can just connect it, and then through the app, you can tell it, hey, I want it to charge at this time.

14:59 One of the weird limitations of

15:05 the battery pack we have at our house is like, we can't do that. Like, either it's charging or it's just charging, and you can only tell it what times to discharge. Why are the controls so bad?

15:16 Who makes your battery?

15:19 You have to name the company right now, 'cause it was not - Not Tesla though. No, it's not Tesla for a while. No, 'cause that one was expensive by like, it was like 40 more expensive. Yeah,

15:26 but yeah, I mean, that's a good question though. 'Cause I mean, you told me once the optimum time for me to charge my car, and so I do that. What would make me wanna go back and like, install

15:35 this app and use it on a continuous basis as a consumer?

15:41 So, there are two incentives to people who might use this thing, who are already, It's routine, two o'clock. It's kind of hard to mess with that. You always wake up with a full battery or at

15:51 least something close to it. The first incentive is you get to track which your carbon emissions might be. I can report to them what the average grid emissions are during those hours that they

16:02 charge, if they will at least report to me ahead of time that the intended charge that night. And so I can produce a nice graph that might show over time how their emissions are declining So that's

16:13 one way to give people some good metrics about roughly what is their carbon impact. And then the second thing is, once I do team with retail electric providers, you'll probably get a little bit of

16:27 a discount. I can't give a large discount. There's only about25 that people spend a month adding electricity to their cars on average. So there's not a lot of room to discount things. I don't

16:40 wanna get too focused on that if the discount also varies greatly with what's the competing fuel which is natural gas which moves like a jack rabbit back and forth up and down so to me I think the

16:52 primary incentive is just to get people aware that they can reduce carbon just like you maybe you're taking out the recycling doing something that's good to the community Yeah and I guess one of the

17:04 questions here is you know I'm on and off one hundred percent renewable plan yes ray what's that what's the distinction or why would I why would I I feel like myself already got this covered I am one

17:16 hundred percent renewables plan why is it matter that it's a normal thinking that people have is that they've purchased the plan they've allocated it so that it's one hundred percent renewables this

17:27 relies on legislation that's put into practice about two or three decades ago to just get this whole thing jump -started where maybe we should add wind turbans because we don't have any yet and so

17:38 this was a great way to incentivize the construction of these wind turbines because in addition to some federal subsidies, the retail electric providers could send over a small fraction of what you

17:49 pay in your bill to the wind turbines. That's great to get you to maybe three quarters to 90 utilization of the wind turbines, but there's that little gap. When the winds are blowing strong,

18:03 nobody's there to take that wind off the grid. I mean, for every pitcher, you need to have a catcher And so it's like the catcher is taking a little bit of a nap right about then. The game can't

18:14 really continue. That's a great analogy. So the point I'm getting at is the old system, I tend to think of a little bit like tipping your waiter. You are definitely sending money to that waiter

18:27 that waiter's encouraged and incentivized. But when you try to do a coordinated clean charge, which is what I'm describing, You're

18:39 a use of electricity synchronizes. quite closely to when it's generated. Unlike your plan, which has no such obligation, you just charge when willy-nilly and there's a mismatch. So basically use

18:54 your analogy. The tip always goes to the wind turbine in my plan. But what we're

19:03 doing is with the app is

19:06 to make sure it's actually coming from the renewable source. It provides a better match, better matching. Better matching I tend to think of it as a little bit like voting. You think about it,

19:16 you make a plan for it, and you have an outcome that you, hey, how is this candidate doing now? They're living up to my promises, their promises. So in much the same way, this extra push that

19:29 people give at two o'clock in the morning, they help out the older wind turbines, 'cause they're the ones that are a little bit more marginal. They are not getting a subsidy. They have expired

19:37 their subsidy after running for 10 years or so.

19:42 a subsidy that used to come from the federal government without that they are not uh. next cheapest in line until all the

19:50 newer ones get but out there and this has longevity to these guys they can stay alive a little bit longer before they tear down or replace them

20:01 and it's my question is also towards and you know jason what you said you have a hundred percent renewable land is that actually possible to you know cuz i thought all electricity is generated and

20:13 goes into the same grid how can you guarantee that someone's getting a hundred percent this

20:21 is a good one way back like i said this is a creature of the legislature for iraq iraq are or for texas i should say uh. like many things in the legal world you create something called a legal

20:32 fiction uh. the first time i got introduced to the concept of the patent lawyer This is the first time I got introduced to this concept was the nature of corporations. In fact, a person, they can

20:42 be sued, they can be criminally liable, et cetera. So that's a legal fiction. So they created another legal fiction, which is, oh, well, we can account for all the electrons as they depart and

20:54 as they arrive. And actually, if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. All those electrons have to end someplace. So they just count up the electrons as they're being generated, then they

21:03 count up the electrons as they're being used. And as long as it balances, everything's cool and kosher It's very important that they're trying to not double count these. So that system has been in

21:14 effect for decades. And it's pretty effective at at least incentivizing some of the early developers. But now we're reaching this point where we have to go so much further and create so much excess

21:27 capacity. There are solutions with its size batteries. But those are very costly to install. There is a significant carbon impact with those and the only 80. of it, returning electricity that

21:41 they previously charge on. So the fiction is, in many ways, the accounting exercise of saying, Here's a bucket of electrons. I'm going to give you the electrons that are renewable and I'm going

21:51 to keep the carbon-intensive electrons for other people who maybe don't value it. Yes, it's almost like a balance sheet. It all has the balance. You can't offer more of these 100 percent plans

22:03 than you have generations support it. Yeah, so there's a limit of if the Texas grade is just 20 percent renewables, which is approximately what it is, 20 percent now. I

22:16 think you might be right. I think it's increased and it's increasing because we're getting more wind power, more solar online.

22:25 So we can only have a limited amount of people who are on the 100 percent renewable plan until we get to 100 percent renewable. Which is common

22:38 So When we think about a typical driver,

22:45 let's like walk through the, I guess, decarbonization economics for someone who owns an EV versus if they don't use your program versus if they do. So if you own an electric car and you just charge

23:00 willy-nilly, the typical carbon intensity is about 360 grams of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere per kilowatt hour So that's fairly middle of the road for the country. You know, if you get

23:15 out to Washington State, it gets down to like 20 to 100 grams per kilowatt hour because they have hydroelectric. You know, if you go to other places like West Virginia, they have a lot of coal

23:25 that they're running off of so they could be 450 to 600 grams per kilowatt hour. In general, even for coal-fired generation, you are emitting far less carbon and you wait for a quilt line.

23:40 internal combustion engine car, which we abbreviate as ICE, ICE. Put that in terms of years and tonnage, because Graham's feels very small. Yeah. Right. So what does, what does actually mean

23:51 for a typical driver? If you are driving a car like a normal American for about 10 years, you'll probably use about 40 as much carbon to get you to those different destinations during those 10 years.

24:02 And that counts the cost to manufacture the car on battery, which is actually a little bit more carbon intensive to build these things, at least currently than an internal combustion car. So you

24:12 actually operate a little bit in a deficit right out of the gate. But long term, you might be using 40

24:20 of what you had previously. So it's a huge step forward, a huge step. But now I think, you know, it may be possible to take that next step, which is add more turbines to the grid in those hours

24:32 the night. And you might get to more like a 15 grams per kilowatt hour as if you add up the long tail of construction costs and build out of the foundations and such, that's roughly what it costs

24:46 for a wind turbine to operate a kilowatt hour. So we take my 40 and what is that coming down to as a driver? Are you ready to lead the decarbonization charge? Energy Technexus is your platform for

25:01 growth, offering unique resources and expertise for energy and carbon tech founders. Join us at energytechnexuscom

25:09 and start building your Thunderlisset. Yeah, so you're saying if I make the switch from an ice car to EV, I'm going to reduce my carbon footprint about 40 over the

25:18 life. But if I take that EV and then charge it at night, what do you think the potential impact is on my carbon footprint? And I realize it's complicated because it's mixing in with the power grid.

25:31 Do you want me to talk about all your carbon I'll put like say when you're flying planes and also you know, I think we'll focus on the Like just the EV, like cars, cars long. So yeah, you might

25:44 be using about 40 of the carbon that you used previously, if you just charged willy-nilly. But if you get to the point where you can charge on the A nights or the B nights,

25:55 many of these nights, you're gonna add a wind turbine. If you and 99 of your EV drivers charge at the same time. So in other words, only 100 drivers will return another wind turbine that's idle to

26:08 the grid So I would estimate, again, I don't have a lot of hard data 'cause I haven't seen people doing this and missing out on some of those AB grades, but I would estimate that you probably

26:18 reduced out 90, it's subtracted and you're really only 10 as much carbon entering the atmosphere as a conventional car. So really the big impact here is, like you said, extending the life of a

26:30 turbine or making a new one come online because you're the economic impact of that.

26:40 Lack of use really drives the Economics on the wind turbine. It keeps them viable a little bit longer You know Typically they'll do a re-powering after about 20 25 years and My intention is to keep

26:55 these things turning a few more turns before we have to take the the Blades off Often they'll install a new tower at the same site and just build a bigger more efficient wind turbine in this

27:06 re-powering But in that interval between you know leaving subsidies behind and getting to a point of replacing that that is the golden Area where I can at least make things more economically viable

27:18 for people who have legacy wind turbines So I know you also organized these meet-up groups for EV enthusiasts. Yes What do you hear? You know from these people what are the conversations? What are

27:32 their concerns and what have you learned? That would you know potentially improve your app. So I'm getting a a fairly diverse group of people coming to the ION EV club or the EV club at the ION.

27:45 And this is kind of like the second phase. I've previously had meetups of one kind or another. In fact, I just came from the North, the National Drive Electric Week listed in Fort Worth. And I'm

27:58 basically inviting people to talk to me who are either driving electric cars or are just interested in driving the electric cars. And I think for a lot of people, they believe that they're going to

28:09 go out and get electricity elsewhere than their garage, especially if they haven't been driving the cars for a while. And so this is one of the first eye-opening moments for them that they will

28:20 actually use their garage as a ceiling center. Yeah. So that's the first thing that comes up. The second thing, and frankly, I didn't learn this until I had been charging in my garage for two or

28:33 three years, is you really don't need as many amps to charge your car as you think you do in the garage. you build a really large charging apparatus in your garage, you're gonna have to put a lot

28:43 of copper wires with very thick gauges and copper's not cheap. So that's another misapprehension. Also, I found out that fewer than half of the electric car drivers, the ones that have had their

28:56 cars for six months plus, they really don't know that you can set a timer in the car to pick the exact hour which it starts to charge. And of course, you mentioned you found it on your Model 3 Oh,

29:08 why? Model why, yeah. So, you know, that's another thing is that, oh, I can charge in my garage. Oh, I can set the time for that charge to be like my Christmas lights at this specific hour.

29:19 Oh, okay.

29:21 And what are you seeing in terms of like uptake, you know, in a state like Texas where we love our Ford 150s and our pickup trucks? I mean, first of all, some of us want a lightning, so I'm

29:32 still waiting for the day I can get one of those, but anyways, continue. So I see Texas as being on the very start of a broad spectrum of adoption for these electric cars. I've studied how this

29:46 uptake occurs in different countries. I mentioned that California is far ahead of us. I think California, about 50 of their new car sales are electric. Here in Texas, it's closer to 7 or 8 of new

29:57 car sales are electric, which means the actual population of registered cars currently stands at around 300, 000 in Texas, which is roughly 1 of all light duty vehicles. So we're at 1 penetration.

30:11 It's a exceedingly microscopic audience. I'm trying to lure in right now. But this thing is going to grow at a fairly substantial clip, like 30 to 40 annualized growth percent. So I think in five

30:24 years, the whole landscape is going to look very different here in Texas. Yeah, and then you're having a lot more competition. It's not just Tesla Now you have Rivian, and you have - everyone

30:34 building trucks now in Texas because that's what we drive here on our big roads and highways.

30:42 I lived in Norway and in Norway, they predicted by 20, 30, 100 of cars would be, newly bought cars would be renewable, sorry, would be EV and they're already 95 is one stone power cars.

31:15 Yeah, exactly

31:18 And on already today, they're at

31:21 95 and they're an oil exporting nation. Yeah, but you know, oil is taxed very heavily over there. You know, it's a lot cheaper. To be fair, everything is taxed a lot. Everything is taxed a lot.

31:33 But it's just, I mean, from the get-go that was one of the incentives they made electric cars. It was actually a lot cheaper to buy a Tesla than any other gas guzzler over

31:43 there. So what do you think is

31:47 in California, the uptake has been more, do you think we need more incentives? Actually, I talked to a Tesla representative, they're talking about deploying some of the less expensive batteries

31:59 in the next year or two. And my guess is if they're doing it, all the other manufacturers can't be far behind. We've been on a fantastic learning curve, if you will, as an industry trying to

32:11 reduce the price of the battery packs. And we're roughly at about100 per kilowatt hour storage right now, which is kind of this Goldilocks zone where you start to become parity with, you know,

32:27 electric. when you know gasoline cars to electric cars. So we may not need this subsidy after about five years. It may be something that the cars by virtue of having fewer parts and having a

32:39 battery that's just not that expensive, you might be able to get a similar F-150 styled electric car truck just at the same price point says you get the conventional gasoline powered ones So, we're

32:54 coming to a point where the subsidies have done their work just like with the wind turbines. They got 10 years of subsidies and then after that they're on their own. We're going to come to a point

33:06 with the gasoline cars and general electrics where

33:12 Frank, the gasoline cars are going to be taking the role of depreciating faster And the EVs, just because people can see the trajectory that we're on. And then once you do drive an electric car,

33:25 Jason, there's no going back. So this is what I'll disagree with you. And I think it's interlaced with incentives, right? 'Cause the reality is, I don't want a big car. And most of the EVs tend

33:39 to create their biggest carbon impact on like the hummers of the world and the F-150s. I joke I want to lightening. What I really want is an electric Maverick, which is a tiny little like pickup

33:48 truck, but they only make those in hybrid. What I want is an electric Miata, which right now, I don't think anyone makes anything in that size class that is electric. Unless you go take your

33:59 Miata and take the engine out and put you on the loaders. Which I'm not gonna do. 'Cause I eat something reliable, right? But I think the, when you think about the most common cars that are sold,

34:08 it's something that's in the class of a Corolla, it's something in the class of a Civic. And the Model 3 is huge compared to what I think about of like a small compact car. And there's a reason why

34:22 those are the most popular models is 'cause that's what people can afford. And so that's where I go back to this is, this is in some ways an incentives problem, but unfortunately like all the EVs

34:32 out there like ginormous, like I don't wanna ginormous as a TV, like personally. But that's in the US 'cause if you look at China, it's different. Well, I can't get a BYD in America, so that's

34:41 the other issue. So watch out, when they set up this factory in Mexico, like I'm gonna be looking close 'cause they make good cars, right? So I think that's a whole different podcast. There is

34:52 still a little bit of a learning curve. As I mentioned, some basic features tend to be buried in the manuals, and I think the one thing that perhaps is shocking to many people, first starting to

35:05 drive the electric cars, is you'll end up charging your current 95 of the time in your garage, and you just don't need to hunt for a gas station. And more importantly, even though the signs are

35:15 minuscule for these charging stations that are publicly open. You have a big dashboard you can just tap on it and it'll just light it up with all the pins for where you can get charges and nowadays

35:29 it's it's literally everywhere just just that their talk tucked away behind a few buildings but they're literally everywhere now so that range anxiety shouldn't be the main deterrent for forgetting

35:42 Navy and I tend to think it's roughly become history the idea of range anxiety i just drove down from fort worth and I remember the old days when we first got our electric car was there was only two

35:54 charging stations between here and fort worth now there's closer to eight and we're literally driving down the road and the cars reporting how much percent of your battery will be available when you

36:05 reach your planned next stop and my wife can say to me however I don't think two percent in the battery when you charge is enough of a buffer and we're going to stop at the next one that comes up and

36:18 literally we have two or three options or what what comes up next. What kind of engineer are you that you don't have a factor of safety? That's my first question. Well, let's put it this way. I

36:26 did used to drive a Tesla Model S7D. Yeah, you have to tell us the story. And this thing only had 230 miles a range. My wife's car now has 270 miles a range. And let's put it this way. When you

36:38 only have 230 miles a range, you really try to use the entirety of that range. You fill it all the way up and you don't want to stop every like hour and a half. You want to go to like two hours,

36:47 20 minutes, whatever So I ran it down to the single digits in terms of miles left on the battery as kind of a normal practice. But, you know, I used to be a pilot and so I was very good at fuel

36:58 management and accounting for winds and other weather factors. So I developed a nice ability to show up with enough juice until this one time, which I could tell you about. It might take a while

37:10 though and go for it. Okay. So I did run the battery entirely out on the Tesla. I do not recommend it, but I was on a long trip. This was maybe my fifth or sixth stop for the day. And during the

37:23 COVID epidemic, traffic was fairly light. So I had that advantage working for me. I was driving through Arkansas to southern Missouri. And I just, I knew already when I left my last charging stop,

37:37 it would be a little tight.

38:10 So I did a little bit of drafting law on the way, not too much behind a semi-truck. And of course, I'm within a mile of the charger, and it's reporting that there's zero in the battery. And

38:10 surprise, surprise, everybody knows you don't want to be heavy on the accelerator when you're down close to the bottom. But nobody tells you that when you take your accelerator off, the car

38:10 transitions to regeneration, converting your kinetic energy into battery power. And apparently the battery doesn't like to be force fed, electricity rapidly when it's very low So it quits on me and

38:15 when I'm on the off ramp.

38:18 about eight o'clock at night, dark COVID has kind of removed a lot of traffic. It's just kind of slow, small, little town. And I'm looking at the stoplight. And, um, thankfully I'm not in

38:29 Missouri because they won't really use this against me and catch me, but I did have to run a red light. Uh, as I was just relying on the momentum to keep me going, I knew that I was only a couple

38:39 of blocks from the charger. Um, it eventually came to a stop about 200 yards from the charger Uh, and, uh, are you able to get out and push guard the steering wheel lock up? You can push it.

38:50 You have to put it in, uh, kind of a toe mode, if you will, with everything's unusual. Uh, I was able to persuade a policeman who came by. He wasn't coming by to give me a ticket because I

38:60 somehow it's baited their notice. And, uh, so I, and another passer by volunteer to do the steering. And so between me and the policeman, we pushed it for about four or five minutes. It was

39:11 flat. Nice If it wasn't flat, these are heavy cars. We pull up to the charger, kind of like a boat pulling up to a dock. We weren't going to do this usual maneuver where you back in, started

39:24 charging, started charging at like one mile an hour 'cause it was at zero or below zero or God knows what. Yeah, yeah, baby it. And it worked, it finally returned to charging. There was no

39:33 damage to the battery, even though it was left at the state for probably about 25 or 30 minutes. I've had seen other people have poor luck when this happens. I won't get into the details with that,

39:44 but I'm just saying don't let your car go to zero, ever.

39:51 Talk to us a little bit about how do you see your app in your business model evolving over time? So I perceive that there are 11 markets I could serve. Many of them are business to business.

40:10 There's a lot of different directions I can go If I can scale, scaling. Necessarily improves things for a number of different constituencies the retail electric providers are big winners I don't

40:23 feel like I want to enter that space. I'd like to become you know, like I said, Mr. Fahrenheit, but for you know, wind production So it's something maybe even the television broadcasters can say

40:35 oh by the way, it looks like tonight's on a night So if you got electric cars charge them so so to me I see potential ways to segue into other businesses like Maybe I could even you know take take

40:51 what capital I'm building Start a wind farm. You know, if I'm very good at coopling to wind farms, that would be a natural segue

41:00 You know, there's Shoot even the military when they run their bases Air Force or army at some point they're gonna transition I don't know that you'd ever want to have your military entirely run out

41:13 electricity because those are often targeted, but At some point, they too are also stewards of our climate. And to some extent, conflicts might be amplified by a little bit of climate frictions.

41:25 So there's a million different ways I can find people who are consuming electricity with flexible loads and direct them. So

41:37 sky's the limit. And I'm thinking this could be interesting, not only just for the retailers, to have it as part of what they're offering consumers, but also a company like Tesla could offer this.

41:50 Yes, certainly one of my vertical markets is approach the manufacturers themselves, let them tap into my API. And for them, I don't need to have a fancy user interface. I just need them to show

42:04 right next to the little battery indicator. You know, you've got one on your iPhone and it just simply fills with a little green line. Why it's green? I don't know somebody said green is the

42:12 nature of electricity, but okay. So you see that on your dashboard. And the good thing about grades is there's no E among the grades, so you can put a little ABC right next to that little gauge

42:24 with the E. I don't know some of them have E's, but now you can know I roll up to the garage. I don't even have to get my phone out. I'll license it to them, perhaps. Yeah, and even a step

42:35 above that, you can put an automation where it just doesn't trigger on a certain day, right? Automation. In there with the OEM Automation is a frontier. To me, the chief concern, why I'm not

42:46 going there first? Because, well, actually, I did do this two or three years. I actually automated in charging the, server a from my car. But to me, there's a

42:55 cyber security risk because I have to interface with like 20 different manufacturers. And if they shuffled things around a little bit, potential gap, perhaps that might be a security risk. And for

43:08 now, I'm not gonna do it. I'm not saying never, I'm just saying for now.

43:13 Talk to us also about being in Houston and starting a company, you joined the Energy Technics and

43:24 the support system that you found and what you perhaps think is lacking.

43:30 I got my start in the ecosystem through the Founder Institute and it was a boatload of information. It really made me work harder, the only time I can remember working as hard was when I was in law

43:42 school, working as an engineer during the day and then going to law school at night.

43:48 You really are like, when you wake up, you're doing stuff either for the business or to satisfy the requirements of learning with Founder Institute. Why did you do this? So I did this at the

43:59 beginning of 2021, which is when I incorporate Wind Everest. So I learned a lot from that. I learned about some of the different resources within the ecosystem. What do you think was the biggest

44:12 thing you learned in that process other than you have to work hard?

44:19 I'm going to say, you know, I'm a patent attorney and I tended to be very, the teams I would work with that were very small. I tended to not look for help, I'd already learned quite a bit through

44:33 law school and you're constantly reading case law to figure out what's changed. So I was very much a very self-help kind of person. I'm an engineer. I build things occasionally. I cut myself while

44:43 I'm building things, you know, I am a hands-on kind of guy And

44:48 perhaps a little introverted, but I learned if you're going to be a CEO, number one, ask people for help. There's a lot of people who will give you some free advice and we're even though other

45:00 founders are busy with their businesses, they're very happy to share. And the second is

45:07 just climb out of your shell. Just get out there, do social media, do speaking events So now I've kind of been. I'm an ex-interver and now I'm an extrovert in part because the ecosystem just

45:21 really wants to let you talk to people. A cup of Joey in particular has been very nice at letting me talk to people, hear people's feedback, that kind of thing. And so, take us back a little bit.

45:33 So, you did the Fowders Institute and then that's, did that give you kind of the ammunition to keep going? Or, what did it go from there? It really filled in big holes in my knowledge about how

45:45 capital is raised and formed at the very instance where companies are started. It made me understand marketing and

45:55 sales, which is, as

46:01 a patent

46:03 attorney, I just work with a patent, obviously. It's argue, argue, argue, give me a patent now Okay, great. So

46:08 in many respects, people find you as a patent attorney. We're kind of a rare breed. In fact, even now, people are saying, Robert, are you still writing patents? No, no, no, no, no, I've

46:17 really left that behind, too labor intensive.

46:21 So, you know, I basically kind of done a 180. I'm now like an octopus extending every direction, listening to every advice or word that the customers and potential customers might have as far as

46:35 what pain points are. And that's, I feel a great bit of growth that I'm going through right now

46:45 And one of the questions is, in your experience in Houston, is there anything that you've found is missing? Well,

46:53 I'm going to be heading up to Silicon Valley at the end of the month. And I tend to think that they're just far more dynamic, a lot more people in the software space developing things. There are a

47:05 few software folks over here like Lizziac is, you know, one of the chief promoters of you know, connectivity in that area. What company is he with? He's with SaaS stock. I think he's also with

47:19 Honeycomb software. He kind of wears two hats. And he runs this newsletter, which is awesome. Yes, yeah, the

47:26 rocket network. So he's sort of like the couple of Joey Sanchez but more

47:38 in the software development space. Just an instigator and connector of many different kinds Yeah, so what's lacking,

47:45 sometimes I feel like I'm on a little bit of an island where all the activities happening out there on the west coast. But you know, so much as well. Internet connects people in so many ways. I

47:56 don't know that it matters. And I'm to a large extent bootstrapping so I don't necessarily have to raise capital right now.

48:06 Do you have any, how can people get in touch with you? How can people support you? Any kind of last message as we close. So I'm active on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, X. Wind Everest is

48:14 basically wind and Everest. It's not winning like human. I just passed across the finish line, it's wind. So

48:28 get in touch with me through any of those social media outlets, we do have on our webpage an opportunity for people to sign up to beta test and I'm expecting that the app should be released sometime

48:41 in the next 30 days to the Apple ecosystem and there's a corresponding version for Android as well. And just to make things super exciting and complicated, we've also got a version that operates

48:52 within a browser. So if you're on a Tesla Model Y, you can literally render it up to your dashboard if you use the browser, log in and get your feedback that way. So I'm already in the dashboard

49:03 in a way. Oh, very good. So the goal is to have 1, 000 drivers sign up eminently. Yeah, 1, 000 drivers, if I can get 100 of them to join a charge party each night, that revives a wind turbine.

49:16 If I get all 1, 000 of them to join a charge party at night, that might revive 10 wind turbines. I think literally we can have the burning fire that I need to put out is that every couple nights we

49:28 have several 1, 000 wind turbines in Texas alone that are going idle for a couple hours. And that's just Texas. I mean, now we've got the grain planes that are also incorporated into my app. So

49:39 lots of opportunity to put these wind turbines to work. So I'm hearing, so you're on a variety of social networks. The one I didn't hear was you're not on Discord. So it sounds like it's gonna be

49:48 a Discord charging party at some point. Yeah, Discord is about a new frontier. We'll see, maybe I'll join that soon. All right, good Okay, great. Thanks for being here with us. All right,

49:58 thank you for inviting me.