California’s biggest clean energy bottleneck with Ali Chehrehsaz (TerraVerde Energy)

Hello. On today's episode of transmission, I'm speaking with Ali, CEO at Terra Verde Energy.

For more than fifteen years, Ali and his team have been helping California's public agencies like schools and water districts, city governments, to take control of their energy future with microgrids and solar and now batteries. And we cover why, actually, the biggest barrier for batteries and solar isn't tax credits and incentives anymore. It's actually the interconnection queue that leaves projects stranded. Personally, I love Ali's optimism. If you're in energy finance or grid resilience, you're gonna love this episode, and I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Ali, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

So let's get stuck into it. Terra Verdi, what do you guys do, and what's the problem that you solve?

We are a leading energy adviser to public agencies in California. We help them deploy and operate microgrids, if you wanna call them that by and large, to help them navigate the rising cost of electricity and the aging infrastructure, grid infrastructure in California that often hinders them from operating their essential and critical services. We largely serve public agencies in the state. So school districts, city governments, water, wastewater agencies, and organizations that are essentially permanent, operators in the state. And our job is to help them navigate their energy needs.

Let's go back to two thousand and nine. So you've been doing this for over a decade.

And, interested to know what what was the gap that you saw back in two thousand and nine that got you on this journey doing Terra Verde?

That's a good question. So I'll go a little bit before that, and I'll jump forward. I'm an engineer by training. I started my career in Canadian oil sands. Great work. Loved it. In two thousand and nine, I decided to transition into renewables.

Through networking, I I got connected to a solar startup in Houston of all places, got my feet wet, as they say, on getting into the solar industry.

What transitioned and transpired into Terre Verde was the gap that we saw in the market when commercial solar, back then we used to call it DG, distributed generation, was about to take off. There were incentives coming into California for deploying on-site solar behind the meter solar.

And we saw a gap in how, by and large, school districts in California had in terms of procuring solar on their properties.

And it was early days, you know, wild wild west. Everybody was dangling the shiniest thing to, you know, these school districts.

And these school districts did not have a way to unpack and identify what is the thing for them to do. How much solar do they need? Where do they need them? How does it save them money?

Which panels should they buy? So we set out with a very small mission and focus mission of help schools go solar. That was really our tagline. Help schools go solar.

And from there, everything grew. Solar technology grew, technologies around solar grew, batteries came into equations, generators, EV chargers, and more and more people adopted solar and they needed help to essentially levelize the playing field between buyers of solar and sellers of solar.

And that's what we set out to create, and fifteen years later, we're still lucky enough to be able to serve.

And where's the company at now? So how many how how many people are there in the company? How many customers do you serve? Can you just give us the baseball card? And then I wanna ask you about some controversial statements about interconnection queues, but we'll get to that in a second. Let's tell us about the company.

Yeah. So the company has been steadily growing. We currently serve, a hundred and seventy clients in California.

By and large, our focus is on public sector, so school districts, city governments, and water wastewater agencies.

And we really focus on these, customer groups for us because they essentially provide either an essential service or call it, critical infrastructure. Right? You gotta educate, you know, students and the next generation of people in this country, in the state. That's the job of school districts. You know, they are here to forever serve California.

City governments, water, wastewater facilities, you know, without them society would die. Right? Like, we will not have cities if we do not have a water agency creating clean drinking water. We would not survive if the sanitation agency agency was not here to clean up waste from our cities. So they are critical infrastructure.

And so we stay focused on serving them. We are involved in the community, and, we try to level up, grow as they grow. And their needs, their businesses have evolved. Both of these groups have different needs in terms of what they need their buildings, their facilities to do.

And no matter where you go in life, you need energy, you need electricity.

And with the trend to electrify everything, the need for electricity and and power generation is ever more critical now.

And so building for that customer profile then, so, essential services, schools, sanitation systems, that kind of stuff. What what how does that change the way that you go to market? How does that change the way that you build and design these systems?

That's a good question. So this is a little bit of a niche view into the world that we have, as informed by the needs of our customers that, differentiates how a solar project or nowadays, we use the word microgrid because you have to do more than solar in order to create value can provide value to a water agency, for example. So if you take that as an example, these agencies operate critical infrastructure. They can't go offline. They need backup power.

Every water agency, every wastewater agency has a diesel generator installed at their site to have backup power support, which is more and more needed as more and more power outages are happening in California. Aging infrastructure plus the threat of wildfire causing the utilities to shut down power lines to prevent, fires from spreading during high wind high wind events.

These operators, and again, staying focused on the water side, they have their own customers to serve.

They sell clean water to homes, businesses in their territory, or they provide they collect sewer and treat that and recycle that for reinjection to the ground.

And that is a critical service that cannot be stopped and has to go on.

We have a saying that every molecule of water requires an electron to go along with it.

So demand for electricity is a critical part of their business.

And when you look through the business of a water agency through the lens of their CEO, typically, they're called a general manager of a water agency.

The three areas are very important for them. There is rates, like how much do they charge their customers for their product, which is, you know, pure water, clean water, or waste cleanup.

There is the regulatory and the state requirements for the quality of drinking water and that they that they serve and and essentially provide to their territory.

And then there is, resiliency, being and reliability, being able to actually operate this plant twenty four seven without hiccups.

At the intersection of these three r's, rates, regulation, resiliency, energy infrastructure plays a critical role.

So for example, as it relates to rate reduction, so operating your business, so your cost of your water service is the lowest, and having resiliency redundancy, a battery co located with the diesel generator is a great solution. It does both. A battery enables you to do rate arbitrage, demand response, peak shaving that saves you money on an ongoing basis during blue sky events. And then during during an outage, the battery is the first grid forming technology kicks in. And if the outage is longer than say four or eight hours, then the diesel generator comes in. So you avoid having diesel emissions because you got a battery.

Pair on top of that solar generation, you get a lot more cheaper electricity to avoid and arbitrage your grid and do more of that level of, economic benefit that can help them reduce their rates, and give them even more because now with solar, you can generate during an outage as well and extend the life of your essentially outage support.

Because of all of these combinations and the fact that our customers essentially need electricity, they really have two choices in front of them. Do they outsource their electricity and buy it from the grid and put up with the grid and the rising cost of electricity in California, which we'll get to, and the challenges of operating with the grid with more outages?

Or do they in source it and buy the equipment and put it, you know, onto their plants and operate their own microgrid and become self reliant. And our customers buy and launch because they have a product that is, you know, in this case, it's water agency selling water.

Their cost of electricity gets baked into their rates that they sell to their customers. Right?

Not much different on a data center where what they sell, right, is, like, data services, but cost of electricity and infrastructure is their cost to operate. Right? It's a cost of goods sold essentially.

So they are inherently buyers of solar and battery and microgrids versus many other, you know, buildings and and and, solutions are out there being sold to folks, which the buyers of those projects are essentially tax credit buyers because they wanna deploy solar and get a tax credits. Sometimes the two meet match up and it's a good solution.

But the initiation of who needs what and why is solar being deployed is very nuanced. And we take the side of, let's create the environment through which solar is bought, not just sold.

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Enjoy the conversation.

So you've spent a lot of time thinking about interconnection challenges in California. I'm I'm smiling because I'm gonna bring up a bit of a contentious statement, which is that you think that interconnection queues are holding up more than even the the tax credit uncertainty that we have at the moment, which is a big statement. So what's going on with interconnection queues in in California?

Yeah. Interconnection queues, there's a problem of that in California. Also, all the other states, have their own version of it. I'm more educated in California because that's where my focus is.

Given the relevance impact of them to projects getting done compared to tax credits or incentives in general.

The two threats here to make a note of is it requires us to zoom out, right, to figure out why why are the impacts of interconnection versus tax credits or in or or incentives impacting project development.

Well, tax credits getting introduced to the solar industry by and large from fifteen, twenty years ago, was a must have. It was it was what we needed to convince and make a compelling case to capital to invest behind this brand new technology that was viewed to be a high risk technology. Right? I remember when I left, oil sands and to join solar, my manager at the time told me, oh, you're you're joining the bleeding edge. Be careful because they might just disappear and be nothing. And, yeah, in two thousand and nine, you know, maybe it was. Maybe we weren't so sure that it was gonna actually be a thing.

It was a gamble, but that was the the prevailing view back then. And tax credits, you know, were very much a great vehicle to help us get here. And over the years, as development went on and solar industry became more mature and we got our processes down, there was always a desire even within the industry, those that were in it, that, look, we need to wind down these tax credits, and we need to have a, essentially, a, a gliding path to get off from thirty percent down to zero. And in fact, we did that. We were on a path years ago to go down from thirty percent to Venezuela's twenty six, I believe, before inflation reduction act came in and reset everything. And now with the HR one, it's like background. It's like we could keep getting, you know, tossed around.

These incentives, when they come and go, they do create misaligned, value creation opportunities where the value is less about somebody who needs solar. I can can can I can create, you know, some benefit with it for themselves, you know, to buy solar to do it? And it's more comes from the industry trying to sell it in order to maximize on tax credits.

If we zoom out and look to the future, you know, at some point, we will not need tax credits. And maybe we had already would have reached this point in time if he had, yeah, if he had winded down already.

Look. When I started in solar in two thousand and nine, you know, three dollars for panels were, you know, like, it was a was a thing. Like, that's how much you spend on it. Right?

For for our audience, how much is the panel today then?

It's like thirty cents now. Right? Thirty cents a watt versus, like, three bucks a watt. Right? That's that's a level of cost reduction we have experienced.

And solar panels are not the only cost of a solar project. Yes. We all know this. But we needed incentives when this was immature.

We probably don't need it now or forever.

So getting off of those incentives is the right thing to do. And the industry as a whole, you know, we need to transition from, you know, incentive led deployment to a post incentive era, to an era where people are buying it because it makes sense to do it.

Now fast forward to today, fifteen years ago, doing a project in California. Yeah. It was expensive. Technology was new.

People had doubts. Incentives helped us make the case that look, take the risk. These incentives help. You recover your money within a few years.

And if the asset works, you know, you'll get the benefits for twenty years. So you could derisk projects with these incentives. And interconnection was not a problem. Like, we could actually plan ahead and say, if you spend these monies against this project schedule, you can go and deploy this infrastructure down the line.

Fast forward to today, filing an interconnection and getting the permission to connect to the grid, especially for microgrid where we need to have, you know, backup power, we need to in addition to getting a permission to operate, you gotta do a pre parallel inspection.

These things have been taking such a long time that I refer to them as the interconnection wildcard.

You don't know upfront how much the utility is going to charge you for doing any and all upgrades on their side that they need to safely interconnect you to the grid.

And two, we really don't know how long it's gonna take. So you put this, like, guesstimate of we think we will be in a interconnection queue for this long and how long it's gonna take to actually get it done.

And when it comes to project deployment, time is the enemy of all projects. Like, if you don't know how long you're gonna be in that project, you can't plan against it. You can't resource load it. You can't set expectations.

And, you know, when you're doing infrastructure where you're inside someone's backyard putting solar battery on their property, it becomes a very difficult challenge to coordinate all these efforts when you can't get a sense of this other third party that who knows when they'll get back to you.

So if I could choose, you know, in a world where I have no incentives, but I had clarity and interconnection, I will choose that world.

So you're a free market guy?

I think that that question is, tough to answer. I don't think there's such a thing as a pure free market.

But clarity is, I think, a a right that we need to have. Clarity on even if the government is providing incentives, which by government, I mean, us putting our money, our tax collective tax revenue to go to a program to take a stance on something. And, look, taking a stance on promoting solar batteries, you know, technologies that give us, you know, reliability, resilience, and they're clean, that's a stance we should take. And as a society, we'll vote for it.

I have voted for it. That's totally fine. Collectivism to promote a stance of the society is good. Lack of clarity is not.

And whether it is coming from the government because they can't, you know, decide one party or another, they're politicizing solar or whatever technology is of the topic of the day, that doesn't help us build. Whether the lack of clarity is coming from the utilities because they can't they're struggling to resource staff on their side for planning, interconnection engineers, and they're overworked, and they can't give us clarity on when can you interconnect.

That doesn't help.

So let's switch lanes then for a second. I wanna talk about methane.

So Yes. You've described methane as a flow versus stock problem, which is a phrase I I I recognize from, there's a popular model, stop stop stop versus flow model, I think, or stop stop I will I'll get this right. Yeah. Stock to flow model, which is used in Bitcoin valuations. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Or valuation forecasts. But it's been a long time since I've looked at anything like that. So, where does it what what's all this about then?

Yeah. I'll I'll unpack that. So first thing, I can't take credit for the term stock flow ratio, either for Bitcoin or as a pure abstract concept, or as it relates to methane. I wrote about this on, my company's blog, Tera blog, and I referenced it to I think it was on an episode of Shift Key podcast with doctor Jenkins.

And I think he referred to it in that term where he was quoting somebody who was referring to it, in that regard. And the notion is this, that when it comes to, climate change and or particularly temperature rise, atmospheric temperature rise, we should care a lot about methane. C o two carbon is what most people talk about, and it's understood. But methane is actually the more impactful of the gases.

I'm gonna try and get this right, but the impact of methane for the long term temperature rise is something like eighty four times more harmful than c o two on a molecule per molecule basis. People should Google this. This is this is a well researched topic. Don't take me at as my word, but it's somewhere along those those numbers.

And, basically, what, I think doctor Jenkins was raising, which is right, is, you know, if we care about how fast does the temperature rise, we should care about how much methane we store up in the atmosphere and how fast do we add more to it.

And when you distill it down, you arrive at this, you know, essentially solution with what do we do with methane that gets emitted from all of our human activity. Right? A bunch of methane comes from, is the wetlands. I don't know as much we can do about it. But a good chunk of it comes from the energy industry, like oil and gas drilling, and also, you know, waste management. Right? Farming and waste management essentially produces a lot of methane, so it's human induced activities.

And really the best thing you can do with methane, if you care about near term temperature rise in the atmosphere, is to burn it as efficiently and as cleanly and as completely as you can. I know it sounds weird to be burning stuff, but it's better to release c o two than methane to the atmosphere.

And when you accept that and understand it and you get past the notion of, oh my god, we're burning something, flames, that's not renewable. Then you kinda actually understand that, oh, yeah. This is a net negative thing to do in terms of temperature rise and contribution to global warming.

And then you start to drill down to, okay, where is methane coming from and how do we address it? And, yeah, the notion of, since you mentioned Bitcoin miners, one of the early adopters of figuring out how to actually combat both wasted energy and climate change were Bitcoin miners. They figured out that landfills have a lot of methane that they emit to the atmosphere.

Landfills are far away from, you know, places where you have people, so there's no interconnection to the grid. So the notion of, you know, burning the methane to create steam, to turn it to turn a, turbine to generate power to deliver it doesn't make sense. Let's just put a bitcoin miner with a generator there and burn the methane, produce electricity, mine bitcoin, we'll make money, and we're helping the planet. Like that, landfill gas mining is a huge sector and companies that are doing well now and got started there, like Crusoe AI, Crusoe Energy, did extremely well in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen. And that was a big part of their business to get into the AI data center. They started with Bitcoin mining, and they were the one of the first ones to get to the landfill methane gas, utilization.

That same thread exists, within my client group, which is wastewater sanitation agencies.

And one of the byproduct of waste management is methane gas. And a lot of these agencies, many of them, you know, in California have either a flare stack where they use that to burn the methane or they try to capture that to do cogeneration in a combined heat and power solution, which is great.

However, the emission the emissions from those combustions are now falling outside of the, regulated, numbers in California as said by the Air Resources Board.

So what we now have is a struggle of we have all of this methane that's coming out of these wastewater plants in California.

And if we utilize them for power generation, we could have a combination of a generator plus a battery, maybe solar of the space to create what we call a methane powered microgrid.

Unfortunately, there are solutions that are coming to market, that are allowing us now to burn methane even more cleanly than with a typical reset engine.

Linear generators are now coming to market, and they've been rolled out. And they're allowing you to essentially do methane combustion.

It does require some treatment, but, have an emission that is much below the the required levels in terms of particulate matter.

And I think we now have this, like, new tool in our tool stack of combining linear generators, batteries, solar to help tap into this underutilized gas that we have in our wastewater plants and create, you know, bigger microgrids and, you know, keep going on this journey of self generation for self con for self consumption.

Very cool. Very cool. So in this conversation, we've been very California focused. And let let's let's stay on that. So if you had the ear of the Californian policymakers and you could change something about the regulatory environment that's really getting in the way, what would that be?

Man. There's a few things that come to mind. I mean, California is, boy. Right? You can say a lot good, a lot bad about it, and people do I'll just share my view and my feelings towards California, and we'll we'll sort of drill down from there so the context is clear. You know, having been doing this business for fifteen years in California, working with, public agencies in the state, Like, our mission of helping enable an abundant California, is very much one of those moonshot type missions that I believe in. I believe in the value of it, and I believe in working with these critical infrastructure essential services agencies, to help enable.

Working with regulators in California in a state that the power markets are regulated heavily. In fact, people say we are re reregulated because we had regulation, we eased off, then we regulated again, is the name of it again. It's it's the it's the rule of this geography. And I'm not the type to say, oh, we should just be done with all regulation and let us do whatever we want.

I don't I don't follow that camp.

But I do believe we need to get to a place where the metrics, the results of what regulations are enabling needs to be accounted for. And those KPIs need to be more transparent to the regulators that are, involved in shaping the future of the state. I can share some slides on and and or we can just, you know, refer it to the audience to go pull up. But if you look at the map of the the contiguous United States, the fifty states, and look at the energy cost at each of these states, California stands out, and the border of California stands out as a, you know, triple the cost of average other states.

And if you really think about it, between California and Nevada, you know, there's a nice clean border.

Geographically, climate wise, land wise, there is not a whole lot of difference between a mile this side of border and a mile that side of border. So why is it that the electricity cost is so much higher on this side versus that side?

That has to do with how we regulate ourselves in California.

And this isn't a, position issue of today. This is a trend issue of you zoom out, especially since pre COVID era twenty nineteen, up to twenty twenty five.

Almost everyone's electricity bill, nominally dollar spent on electricity to operate any building has doubled.

And this isn't, you know, just in a, look at the rates and look at this and that. It's like, look at the dollars. You look at the bills. Right? Like, we do counterfactual bills for all of our our customers, and I have the data that goes back. And the same plant producing the same output, its bills have doubled.

And you look at where we are today in California, you know, the fact that we put the cost for wildfire mitigation into the electricity rates and not tax base it will increase the, you know, cost of electricity going forward.

The fact that, our utilities, which are regulated, have submitted, what's called in California, a general rate case, where for the next three years, each of these utilities need half a billion to seven hundred and fifty thousand million dollars per year to invest in infrastructure grid hardening.

That's gonna get rate based.

California has a goal to reach hundred percent clean energy at the state level.

That is going to force us to go get essentially wind power from offshore or other states, which means we have to build transmission lines. Those transmission lines, the cost of infrastructure will be rate based.

These three forces will continue to increase rates in California.

On top of that, we have a both a demand and also a push for electrification. Right? A lot of people who can afford it are interested in electrifying their vehicles, their ovens, their heat pumps.

At the business level, there's regulation that's, forcing public agencies to electrify their fleets, their medium heavy duty trucks.

So electricity loads gonna go up, electricity costs gonna go up.

You look ahead to the end of this decade, I think we are headed towards an affordability crisis in California, which is already here. A number of a meaningful number of California electricity rate payers are behind on their electric bill.

Those are not necessarily people you hear the most about because they are the more the less heard of people in the society.

But at my customer group level, public agencies I work with, you cannot have a conversation in their general business operation and have the issue of electricity affordability and how much is that gonna cost us if we want to build this plant not come up.

So my message to regulators to what I could change in the state if I had a magic wand is you gotta look at the KPIs of what's going to drive prosperity and growth in the state and work backwards as to what do we need to do differently so that we can enable growth here in California for us.

Well, I hope they're listening.

I hope so too. I mean, we we definitely lobby support. We are active in the at Sacramento at the legislation level.

And, you know, there's a very novel thing again why one of the reasons I love my job is that my customer groups, public agencies, they are cohorts, and they work together to create change. And especially given that they're public, they get a good audience from the state.

So it helps, but, you know, this these are complicated matters. Passing a bill, making a change, it's not the stuff of weeks or months. It it takes often years to get there, but good work is being done every day.

Very good. And now let me go to our last couple of questions. So firstly, is there anything that you wanna plug to our audience who tend to be electrification folks around the world? Then this is your chance. And then I wanna get straight to your contrarian view.

Sure. What do I wanna plug? There is one thing I'd love to plug if that's, the opportunity.

So one thing that we have created and made visible is the value of solar savings, which sounds very simple and it sounds like old news.

But from the dawn of this industry, people have loved to forecast what solar can do for a building to save them money.

But nobody really looks back in real time and say, hey. How much did solar actually save me on my electric bill last month?

That exercise is something that requires you to create a counterfactual bill, a counterfactual usage, a counterfactual actual bill using the same tariffs or rules of the utility and the rate schedule, the rate numbers that they use.

And it's turns out it's a quite complicated calculation to do to create this counterfactual bill or shadow bill, people call it in the industry.

So we have created a software called solar shadow API, and you can go check it out, solar shadow a p I dot com, That helps enable you to answer that question of how much money did I bill on my utility bill last month because of solar, battery, you know, linear generator, whatever you had behind the meter. And they can also help you do scenario planning of what if I was on a different rate schedule.

And it turns out this is something that utilities themselves try to do for their customers to help them, you know, find better rate options.

But funny enough, they can't do it as fast or as cleanly as the software that we have.

And for us, that has been essentially the operating system of our company where when somebody comes to us and they need help with operating solar or figuring out how to do more batteries or EV chargers or whatever, we started there on solar shadow, and we onboard them. We make a digital twin of all their buildings and their electric meters. We can recreate any bill from any utility in California and then get to doing good work now that we have the confidence of we know how much your electricity cost is or will be. So let's go do projects now with confidence.

That's my plug for for the episode.

So we'll put that in the show notes then. Solar shadow API dot com.

That's right.

Do have a look if you're interested in that. I always think that, people have heard me say this many times before, but electricity billing is like rocket science.

It is just so difficult to get right. And, so much of big utilities and energy companies is billing, and yet there are so many mistakes. It is so often, it's just a perilous thing to be doing. It should just be adding up and taking away.

Right? How is that add up, take away, put some some time bands on it. How should it be that hard? But it is.

It's really, really hard to do.

It is very complex. Again, from the the policy, the p of policy that we've put on physics. Right? Because it should just be kilowatt hours times dollars.

Right? It's just physics and math, but there's policy involved in it. So, you know, you and the building next door, depending on what you're set up to do, you get a different value for that fifteen minutes of electricity you used. And it's just mind blowing.

And but that's what the rate planning is. And you can listen to hours of episodes on on various podcasts about this. It's it's a it's been world.

Alright. Now for your contrarian view then. So, Ali, what do you believe that not a lot of other people believe?

Oh, boy. I don't know if this is that contrarian, but I feel energy consumption in many areas that especially in California that, we're involved in is viewed as a negative thing.

The word conservation is used a lot and we gotta use less.

And I believe the exact opposite. I feel we have to enable the culture, the mindset of being efficient with things, but promote life in a way that actually enables more need for electricity, more need for water, because that's what growth is about. And that's how you enable that. And fearing the lack of energy, lack of water is going to drive us towards doing things that will actually wind us down as a society versus taking on the abundance mindset that, no, we can go produce water.

We can desalinate water with cheap electricity, and we have a technology to go do it. In fact, other regions in the world are have done it. Look at Israel. Like, they have have a they have a great handle on the water.

They have contributed so much to water innovation.

And, you know, we started with solar. That was cool maybe fifteen years ago, and then it kind of fell out of favor because other cool technologies came. But I'm a long I'm long on solar and all things that that solar enables, like batteries, EV charging, electric, you know, electrification of homes and buildings.

So my my contrarian view is, you know, innovation over scarcity and especially innovating for abundance versus regulating for scarcity is is a tagline that, you know, I try to promote with you know, in the state of California.

And I think good things will come our way if we take on that mindset and drive towards growth.

Yeah. I I very much agree with you. Very much agree with you, especially on, water plants in the Middle East. I mean, it's just amazing what you can do with seawater now, when you're when you're constrained by the weather. And, yeah, I I feel like the world's kind of waking up after a bit of a a bit of a crazy party in the last half a decade where the world moved towards thinking that doing it was all about doing less.

And now I agree with you. A growth mindset and abundance mindset is how you innovate out of many of the problems we have, I think. I I hope.

So, Ali, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast. If you wanna check out Ali's blog, you absolutely should go and do that. We're gonna put the link in the show notes. And, also, do go to solar shadow API dot com where you can create a shadow bill and see the impacts of solar on your site. If you are is it just California, or do you do other places as well?

The software can scale to anywhere in the world, but we are focused on California.

Alright. Alright. Coming to a region near you soon. And thanks, Ali, for joining us. It was a pleasure.

Thank you. Thank you so much for the conversation.