Smart Devices, Smarter Grids: Unlocking Behind-the-Meter Flexibility with Karl Bach (CEO & Co-Founder @ Axle Energy)

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of transmission. Today, Q is joined by Karl Buck, cofounder and CEO of Axle Energy, an energy flexibility platform that connects distributed energy assets to electricity markets. In this conversation, they discuss how Axle orchestrates hundreds of thousands of devices, from batteries and EVs to heat pumps representing over a gigawatt in capacity. They also discuss how the grid is moving from flexible generation and fixed consumption to fixed renewables and flexible consumption. What I found particularly interesting is Karl's argument about distributed flexibility being essentially capex free. But you'll have to listen to the podcast to find out why. And as always, if you're enjoying Transmission, please feel free to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, let's jump in.

Carl, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Q. Great to be here.

So let's start with Axle Energy. What is the company, and what's the problem you're trying to solve?

Axel is an energy flexibility platform. We connect distributed devices, electric vehicles, batteries, and electric heating and cooling into flexibility markets. So from a US audience perspective, we'd be considered a a virtual power plant or VPP.

So we primarily do two things. We take these devices, connect to them, and enter them into energy and flexibility markets, and then we optimize them. So we create as much value as we can based on the needs of the consumer and the needs of the grid.

And we don't deal directly with end consumers ourselves, so we do the the back end software, and we work with companies that have end customer relationships. So those could be hardware companies, energy suppliers, and others, and we enable them to offer more value to their customers over the long haul. And from a grid perspective, we take something that can be a strain on the grid, so increased load from electrification of transport, electrification of heat, and we turn that into an asset. So instead of having unconstrained load that could could draw on the grid at tight times, instead, we provide flexibility of the grid. So we turn that constraint into into a source of value.

Alright. Let's take stock of where the company is at right now. For anyone who's interested, there'll be links in the show notes. You should go check out Axle Energy's website for a start. It's, it's very cool. And could you just share how old the company is, how many comp how many people are in the company, who's back to you until this point. And then we're gonna talk a little bit about the vision and because there's there's a big grand mission that you guys are on.

Of course. So we've been around for about two years now. We're around twenty people in total, and we've grown quite quickly over those couple years. So we're in the hundreds of thousands of of connected devices, and those are predominantly EVs, batteries, heat pumps, as I mentioned, and that's over a gigawatt of of rated capacity.

We've raised a a couple funding rounds. So our most recent round was our our seed round led by Excel.

And how we see ourselves is we're effectively the back end software infrastructure layer that is enabling distributed flexibility to support the grid.

And so the who's the customer then? My understanding is the customer is utilities. Right?

So we have predominantly two types of customers. So one could be utilities. So, of course, they already have an a relationship around energy with a customer. The other is hardware manufacturers. So when you think about an EV, a battery, etcetera, you don't just have your energy supplier, but you also have the company that manufactures the the kit and the device and sells it to you, installs it, and and manages it for you. And so in many cases and and this gets a bit into the regulatory sphere of things, but we can take something on behalf of a an OEM, a hardware company, and we can still go and monetize that. And we can do that independently of the energy provider or the utility.

When you're pitching your business to potential customers, let's think about the energy suppliers or utilities, which, of course, have a massive mandate to make the best out of all of these behind the meter assets.

And I'd imagine many of them aren't particularly sure about how to make that happen, I'd I'd imagine many of them aren't particularly sure about how to make that happen.

How how do you get onto their books? How do you how do you sell to them?

We're based in the UK, and the UK is a deregulated energy market. And that means that energy providers are competing against one another. So there are two broad mandates. So the first of all is you can offer your customers lower costs if you're able to shift around when they consume energy to consume at the lowest cost period.

And if you can offer them lowest cost, that means you have a competitive advantage over others that can't. You can create more value for them. So that's on their customer facing side. On the backside, you're also protecting against your own risk and exposure.

So if your customers are using energy whenever they want and we're seeing more volatility energy prices as we get more intermittency and things like that that on the grid, That means that if you have a bunch of customers using energy at six PM on a cold winter's day in the UK, you could be left holding the bat you quite a bit of exposure. But instead, you have the flexibility. You can shift that heating up a couple hours to, say, three PM. That means you're protecting yourself and you're able to provide a bit more stability for yourself as a business.

And a few minutes ago, you said a hundred thousand connected devices, which is absolutely remarkable for a business that's, you as you said, two years old. You've gone so, so quickly.

And what's interesting is the way that you've scaled, especially around manufacturers and OEMs. We're gonna talk about that in a second. But before we get there, what's the distribution like of the types of assets that are in that hundred thousand?

Is it heating or is it EVs? Or what's that spread look like?

Yeah. So the order is number one, electric vehicles and electric vehicle charging. Number two is batteries. So that's batteries in people's homes and businesses.

And then number three is heating, and that could be a heat pump. It could be a electric hot water tank or a stationary heater. And part of that is is based on the UK, which is our home market. We're entering other markets as we speak where the distribution of those devices is a bit different.

But electric vehicles, especially pretty much anywhere in the world, is a is a high growth market, and and that creates an opportunity to create additional value as those devices get rolled out.

And the home market's tricky. I always respect businesses that manage to crack the the b to c market. Of course, you're not quite b to c because you're you're infrastructure that supports the bigger entities. But there is a there is a b to c element to it, right, that the end user is that. And so when you're thinking about scaling the business, there are other folks in the last decade or so who have started at building a brand name. Right? They've started creating an energy company that specifically goes after, you know, flexibility and home management and and control.

Or, there's a number of roots, but you you you focused in on the manufacturers. So can you talk through that side of the strategy and how you figured that bit out?

So let's say you're buying an an EV for the first time. You pick a Hyundai. You lease it. Since most people lease, they don't buy. You buy a a charger that you're gonna install in your garage. Let's say you buy a Zappi here in the UK.

You pick an energy supplier.

You maybe sign up for an app. There are already lots of big brands that have built consumer trust that are vying for your attention.

And from our perspective, what the customer doesn't need is another app, and that's not really our secret sauce either. What they need is their car charged at the lowest cost, ready when they need it. And if we're able to partner with these brands that already have strong trust and buy in and relationships and we can provide more value for them and their customers, To us, that's a a better business model and a better approach than than trying to to elbow some of those existing companies out of the way.

Yeah. The last thing you want as a consumer is more hassle and more things to integrate and more, yeah, as you say, more apps.

Hyundai is a good example. How how does that work in practice? How does your system actually work? What are the endpoints?

What's the technology?

Of course. So let's say you have an EV and you are deciding how you want to charge your car. The the very basic setup is you plug in your car and immediately starts charging.

The second is you have some sort of scheduled charging. So you say, I want my car to charge from midnight to five AM every day. And then the third option is, I want my car to be fully charged by seven AM. I don't care when it charges as long as it is as it is.

So that's what we do. We enable our partners to do that third option. So when the customer sets their preferences, they say, I want my car charged at seven AM or six AM or whatever it else it is. And we effectively provide APIs.

So we provide the the back end infrastructure that allows them to collect that information from their customers easily.

We take those preferences. We use other bits of information. So we'll connect to the hardware via API. We'll use that data to register the the car or the charger in energy and flexibility markets.

And then once we have that set up, we have the preferences of the consumer. We have the registration in the market. We have the daily needs, then that allows us to optimize. And that gets into the Datadot operation, which is how do we create as much value as possible based on those needs of the consumer and the requirements of the grid at any point in time.

And what's the promise to the consumer then? One of the challenges for anything within the home is anxiety around the behavior change. So whether it's heating or putting the washing machine on or whatever, there's a there's a real pushback from consumers around giving the keys to the house or the keys to the automation of the house to a third party. So how do you make sure the guardrails are there to put the end user at ease?

Consumer trust obviously is critical here, and we effectively promise the consumer four things in order. And, again, it's not through us. It's through our partners. So the first is that, you know, this is a a dual use device.

Supporting the grid isn't the primary use. That's the secondary use. So So the first is that whatever your needs are, so your car is charged, your your home is heated, that comes first.

Number two is that you maintain control as the consumer. You can override the preferences. You can say, I want my car charged right now, my home heated right now, whatever you want.

Number three is that we're not gonna cost you money. So nothing we're gonna do is gonna hit your wallet. And then number four is we're gonna make you money. And, you know, from from our perspective, when we think about the grid and we think about trading, we often focus about how do we go and create value from the market, but that has to come after the other three. And the way that you ruin trust is by moving number four up in the up in the list if you're getting greedy, let's say.

And so which which regions do you operate in today, and then where are you expanding into? And then I I wanna ask you about the specifics of the markets you operate within those regions. But let's start with, you know, which countries, which grids are you in?

So our our core market is the UK or Great Britain to be more specific, and that's where our focus is. So we have some under the wraps early stages in in other markets right now, and we're in the process of developing those. But as as you know very well, electricity is a heavily regulated space. How this looks and works in in different parts of the world, different states in the US, different countries in Europe, you name it, is very different. So it's not your typical b to b SaaS where you just change the language and it's good to go. It's it's a bit more involved than that. And so today, we're we're at scale in the UK, and we have a couple other markets that'll be coming online at scale soon.

Can you talk through maybe give some examples of some of the customers you work with or brands you work with in the UK? Are you allowed to do that?

Yep. I I can talk about some. There's some I can't talk about, as I'm sure you understand.

So on the hardware side, so we work with battery companies like SolarEdge and Give Energy. We work with EV charging companies like Miner, Zapby, PodPoint, Easy, etcetera, energy suppliers like Good Energy. So so those are a few of of the companies that we publicly announced.

And more under the hood that you can't mention.

And more coming.

More coming. Okay. Let's talk about the energy markets bit then. So the market access is a tough thing for small assets, and it's getting it's got easier over time with aggregators and and and reform and regulatory changes. But it's still difficult to get in there with domestic sized fleets without real scale.

So which markets can you access with a fleet of, let's say, EVs?

And how are you how are you doing that if we focus on the UK for a moment?

This is something that we're incredibly proud of. So in the UK, we operate in the full range of markets available.

We participate in the wholesale power market, so we're trading directly in day ahead, intraday imbalance. We participate in the UK's capacity market. We participate in ancillary services, so that's at the grid operator, NISO level. And we also participate in local flexibility markets run by the distribution networks or or DSOs.

And it took us about two years to get into all of those markets, and it was a drawn out fight to get get to that point. In many cases, we were the first to do so. So we were the first to participate in the capacity market with EVs or or any assets in the home. We were the first to participate in the wholesale market via new mechanism called p four one five. You had a podcast about that pretty recently and doing so directly with distributed assets without the involvement of of the energy supplier.

And and that's because when you when you look at these markets, they were designed for a small number of large scale assets. They were not designed for a large number of small scale assets.

So the reality is that we have had to work very closely with the grid operator, with settlement body, with regulators, etcetera, to figure out how we make that happen. And we're also in the process of changing rules where there are nonsensical barriers to that because this is new and this is still happening. And we wanna create as much value, but sometimes that means that we need to go and change things so that we can go and and fully participate in these markets.

I've got to ask this question. In in a previous life, I worked at an aggregator, and we got a lot of distributed assets, especially small and medium sized businesses. We got their assets into frequency response contracts. And one of the big problems with frequency response at the time, and this is when it was only firm frequency response in UK, so you had a you had two seconds to respond. We had all sorts of problems with latency.

And when you press the button or you expect the systems, the distributed systems, maybe fifteen, twenty assets to respond, The combined net output of those being really difficult to estimate, and you have to overcompensate we had to overcompensate with loads of over delivery, for example. I know technology has moved a long way since I was doing that in twenty sixteen, but that problem seems way more complicated when you've got twenty, thirty, forty thousand electric vehicles and even more when your your platform gets even stronger and you've got more assets. So how do you make sure when you press the button or the system, hypothetically, presses the button that the power is there? And how do you think about response curves and and all of this really cool nitty gritty?

This is where it gets fun. So as you said, it's very different to participate in frequency services with, let's say, a thousand ten kilowatt batteries versus one ten megawatt battery.

And, you know, that's why at the end of the day, we're a software company first and foremost. So we're dealing with real devices in people's homes and businesses, and there are all sorts of issues with that. So devices have different firmware. They might be on home Wi Fi connections that are spotty. If it's a car, sometimes it drives away.

And there are all sorts of barriers there. So on our back end, we've effectively built an orchestration layer. And what that does is it figures out at any given period of time how much flexibility can we get out of this asset. And that allows us to participate in in frequency services that in some cases are are quite fast response.

And it helps us really understand what is the most we can extract from this this given device at a given period of time. Because as you said, you know, if we're conservative there, that means we we create less value. And part of our our secret sauce is is effectively that how do we take the real world constraints that aren't going away and understand them as well as we possibly can so that we can deliver on our commitments to the grid while not leaving value sitting on the table?

I imagine there's all sorts of technical challenges that I haven't thought about or our listeners haven't thought about with dispatching tens of thousands of assets in real time. Can you just talk about some of them? I I imagine, you know, Wi Fi speed really matters.

I imagine there's all sort of you know, metering and loads of things. So what sort of problems rear their head with this kind of technical challenge?

Yeah. This is one of the benefits of working directly with the hardware company. So we're not using a bootlegged mechanism or bootlegged version of an API to communicate with a device. We're working directly with the hardware company that has built, designed, sold, managed the hardware.

And that comes into it because often if you think about an API, in many cases, if you say, you know, charge my EV at six PM, how quickly that hits the the given EV doesn't really matter. And the default setting there is that those instructions are batched. So if you send too many instructions at once, it'll effectively get paused and come in later. While in a case where you need to have twenty thousand batteries respond at the same time, you need all of those instructions to go out really quickly.

And part of that is you need the ability to scale the infrastructure on the back end to support that. And so because we have close working relationships with these partners and we're working effectively on behalf of them, we're able to tell them if you're able to make these specification changes to the underlying protocol communication protocol, there's additional value for you and your customers. And so that's often what the relationship is is we show there is additional value in doing so, and let's work together to make that happen.

And as a technology layer, I assume you don't have to do the billing aspect.

We don't do billing, but we have to do settlement, which is so you do you still have to be part of it.

Yeah. Because if you're listening, this is this is like a moto bingo card. I thought we said ten times on a podcast before, billing is one of the hardest things to do in the universe. Yeah. And you get to avoid doing that and just get to play with the technology. What a business.

Yeah. You know, we do have a, through our partners, a contract with a customer that if they provide flexibility, they'll get paid for it.

And so we need to prove to the grid that we did what we said we're gonna do, and that's often through meter readings and things like that. Then we get paid, and then we need to make sure that the consumer gets paid for what they provided. So it's it's different from a a utility billing, but we still have have money changing hands here that we need to make sure gets the right person.

You must think about this a lot. How are customer expectations around flexibility in the home evolving? What what's what's happening in that space?

And are people really ready to hand over the keys or the control to a third party yet? Has there been that shift?

This is really exciting. So when we started, flexibility, at least in the UK, at the consumer level, for the most part, didn't exist. So, effectively, no EV or home battery or heat pump was really providing flexibility to the grid.

And as we and others have helped to crack open the market, we have people with a battery in their home where they've made a thousand pounds in the past six months. And and that's not your median expected outcome. Don't wanna set the wrong expectation, but they'll then go and share that on social media and tell their neighbors and and say how cool this is. And so more and more, this is becoming the norm. So when you're when you buy an EV, when you buy a heat pump, you're coming to expect flexibility and the value that comes with that. And the more you expect that, the more that brings others in the ecosystem, and we are starting to see that snowball effect where it really is becoming what's expected.

And when we think about how do we decarbonize grids, how do we offer a low cost, low carbon, reliable grid, flexibility from homes and businesses is critical, and it's incredibly exciting to see that momentum build and see that trust start to build.

Thinking about that trust part then, you must have had to go really hard on data security. And not just the technology around data security, but the feeling around it, the perception of it. So how have you thought about that that problem set?

Data security is absolutely critical here. And in the UK, the the regulator and government is introducing a new licensing regime that will have a specific effective load controller restriction and license on us that specifies what we need to do. And we're incredibly supportive of that because, you know, for the most part, these are things that we and other businesses that are reputable are already doing. But it also helps set the expectation broadly in the industry that, you know, you're not touching somebody's charging or heating or something like that if you don't meet these strict standards. Because it is true. We we ingest and consume huge amounts of data. And if if anything happened there, that would be catastrophic.

So it sounds like there's been a shift in behavior, and there are an ever increasing number of assets available for a platform like yours. So how big could this thing really get?

I'm a dreamer. I'm an optimist, so I think that this will get absolutely huge. But the the numbers, for the most part, speak for themselves. So so let's look ten years in the future. We're gonna have five hundred million EVs on the road globally.

We'll have six hundred million heat pumps installed in homes and businesses around the world. We'll have hundreds of millions of batteries. So we're gonna have over a trillion of these large, from a consumer perspective, large flexible device devices.

And and I think it's highly likely that that's over a a terawatt of flexible capacity. And just to put that into perspective, we're at something like nine terawatts of total installed generation anywhere in the world today.

So so I I fully expect that this will be an absolutely massive contributor to how the grids grids operate in the very near future, and that'll be, you know, effectively on par with what we expect to see in the grid scales battery space as well.

And then so for the consumer because in some cases, you you mentioned earlier that there there are these social media posts that have virality where someone's made a fortune with their battery in six months. As you say, I mean, that's that's a the long tail of the distribution.

How do you think about compensation for customers and users for this? Are there other types of rewards you can offer? I'm just thinking about other parts of the consumer consumer businesses that have gamified this kind of service. Now I think to well, Octopus have managed to pull off in the last couple of years since COVID with their flexibility service, which was the the demand flexibility, which is absolutely incredible.

How do you think about getting the end consumer excited about not just here's a few pounds off your bill, but the bigger picture?

Yeah. So from our perspective, there needs to be both. So consumers are drawn to helping the grid and and supporting decarbonization more broadly. They're also drawn to value, to money in their bank account. So with our partners, we've worked through all different sorts of mechanisms from free miles, from public charging, to points that can be redeemed, to pure cash and and everything in between.

And, yeah, as I mentioned before, today, we're still in very early days of of this as a a common way of operating the grid. And so for the most part, this is all great. It's it's just pure upside for the consumer.

I do expect as the market develops, it will be much more competitive, and there'll be different providers offering different sorts of value in different ways, and consumers will shop around and pick what's best for them. And that's, yeah, what I see as a healthy competitive environment, and and I'm excited to see what consumers and competition in the industry as a as a whole draw out and and what sort of of of different offerings we we end up getting from that.

Really excited to see where you go with that and very excited to see you at launch in the US, watching this closely. So so thinking about your business and and where it fits, one question I've got is why I think I know the answer because they're very different types of businesses. But why wouldn't suppliers do this themselves? And, of course, if we think about Octopus, for example, they've gone pretty heavily into demand side flexibility, and they've got a big EV control plan. So how do you think about where your business sits versus these big suppliers?

First of all, suppliers definitely can and should do this themselves, and we work with suppliers on the back end to help them doing so. And part of the reason where why that makes sense is, of course, they already have a relationship with the customer when it comes to energy.

The the difference here is that relationship prime predominantly is about billing customers for their energy usage. That's very different from controlling an EV and and when it charges and ensuring that heating works at the right time. And it doesn't necessarily need to be the energy supplier that the consumer trusts to ensure that that's delivered to them at the best possible outcome at the best possible cost and and value for them.

And how we think about this is a bit of the transition from landline to mobile. So if you had BT as your provider of of landline and then you decided to get your first mobile phone back in the day, maybe you'd want BT to to be your provider for mobile as well. But it doesn't necessarily need to be BT. You could choose to go with somebody else.

Well, they did. Right? They they created one to one, if you remember. And it was rubbish, but we're all stuck on it.

I'm showing my agency now.

And and that's because, you know, doing landlines is not necessarily the same as doing mobile, and and some will be able to to make that switch. And I think Octopus has done fantastic work here as as you mentioned. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the supplier is the natural choice of the winner. They could be, but they are one of many in this space.

One of the old outages or problems in our sector has been how do you get the attention of the control room, whether it's National Grid or any, you know, system operator somewhere. And that that is changing and has changed as flexibility has become a bigger part of the system. Right? So so how how is the grid changing, and how is it the way it's operating changing to accommodate more flexibility?

History is critical here. The grid has effectively operated the same way for a hundred years. You have fixed consumption, where here's how much electricity consumers will use at a period of time, and you have flexible generation. So you have a control room where that will pick up a phone and say, hey, gas power plant. Can you ramp up or ramp down to meet the needs of the consumer right now?

And all of that's changing. It's getting flipped on its head. So instead, you'll have much more fixed generation. You can't choose when the sun shines or the wind blows, and you'll have flexible consumption.

So if you need your EV charged at by seven AM, you don't care whether that charges at ten PM or two AM. And so what that means is we we're moving from a grid that's very top down command and control architecture, large single pieces of kit, to millions of nodes on a network that are responding real time dynamically to typically price signals. And that's a tough challenge for a a control room that is, for the most part, done an incredible job of of keeping the lights on. Yep. This week, we had Spain and and Portugal notwithstanding.

And that means that we'll need some changes in leveling up the infrastructure and software and capability to ensure that those price signals are available for people to dynamically respond to.

So now let's move on to for our listeners who tend to be energy storage and flexibility folks across Europe, the US, and Australia.

Is there anything that you want to plug? Is there anything that's going on in your business that you think our listeners need to know about?

I was reflecting on my own journey here, and one thing that I am slowly starting to appreciate is that I need to check my priors at the door. And that's because I will look at a space. I will look at a geography, something like that. I will come to a conclusion about where that market is, and I'll move on, and I will hold on to that.

But the reality is this is moving so quickly. So if if I or or somebody else has looked at something even a year ago, it could could be completely out of date today. So what I'd say is, you know, if you've looked at consumer flexibility in the past, this ain't your grandma's consumer flexibility anymore. This is a a new space.

It's changing. It's growing. It's evolving, and there's real volume here. So, yes, individual devices have a tiny fraction of what what you'd see from a grid scale best, but we're talking about hundreds of thousands, millions of devices, and that's, you know, in the gigawatts of flexibility today.

So so I wouldn't dismiss it just because it hasn't worked in the past or just because it's small on an individual scale.

It feels like all aspects of behind the meter are having their glow up right now after decades of thinking about it. It's finally happened in domestic and and industrial and small business.

It really is starting to make sense. Now let's move on to the contrarian view. So what's the thing that you believe, Karl, that not a lot of other people believe?

I'm gonna say something that you're probably gonna disagree with and maybe will vehemently disagree with.

And that's Of course.

I I genuinely believe that distributed flexibility will eventually outcompete grid scale storage.

And that's for a couple reasons. So So first of all, distributed flexibility is effectively CapEx free. So you're buying a car. You're buying heating. You're buying solar and storage in your home. You're buying it for some other use, and so the the CapEx isn't necessarily flexibility CapEx.

And the other bit is the most valuable flexibility is closest to consumption.

And some of the most lucrative, valuable places to site best have already been snapped up. It's getting harder and harder to find good locations. Great connections are hard. And, also, just building infrastructure, that's something that's not necessarily scale scalable or more modular.

So we need huge amounts of transmission and distribution, you know, good old fashioned wires that needs to happen. It will happen. We're obviously incredibly supportive of that happening, but that is hard and expensive.

And in many ways, it can be easier, cheaper, faster to plug something into somebody's home. The result of that is, I think, in the not too distant future, the effective opportunity cost of providing flexibility from a distributed asset will be lower than that of a grid scale asset.

And I don't see that as one or the other. You know, we absolutely need both here, and both are contributing to the same broad objective. But, you know, I do think we're gonna see some some juicy competitive markets, and and it'll get fun before before too long.

So the war is on. I was just thinking which part of what you were saying there.

How do I wanna break down the argument? Which which part do I start with? And then I figured, you know what? This is gonna go on for too long.

But a couple of things a couple of things Give us give us one.

Give us one.

Well, I think I think the the assumption of flexibility is most valuable at demand actually doesn't stand to reason necessarily. It's it's very specific to the type of grid that you are connected to and the kind of constraints you have on that grid. So that's the that's the first thing. I I I'm not sure it's CapEx free.

So if the the of course, if if the if everybody had batteries already installed in their houses, it would be CapEx free. But there is there is some CapEx element to that, and, there is a difference in CapEx when you get to, why am I why am I arguing with you here? Right? Well, I'm gonna do it.

So, of course, there's there's economies of scale. Right? So grid scale batteries can buy. You you you have these incredible scaling factors that drive down the cost, which don't necessarily apply in the same way to behind the meter, which has always always been a thing.

Right? So but as a I guess if you say what you said that it's CapEx free, then you're comparing one one side to zero. But I I'm not sure. I do believe it's CapEx free.

However, it does get me really excited. I think there's a massive opportunity to make residential flexibility a big part of the market.

But I do I'm an I'm an old fashioned guy. I still think there's a there's a still a role for big, sexy generation, some of it spinning things, and big, grid scale assets. But we shall see. And I guess over time, there will be, eventually, sometime, maybe in our lifetime, some sort of fight to the death between these two technologies because they should end up being as everything else gets pushed out the merit order, you do end up to a point where batteries will cannibalize batteries, and demand side response or flexibility will come cannibalize demand side flexibility. And you'll get to a point where they'll meet in the middle, and then we'll have the big showdown.

And then we'll see.

Yep. Absolutely. But I I think at the end of the day, we're seeing lots of intermittency from renewables, and that means we need a huge amount of flexibility from grid scale, from distributed.

It's all pouring into a deep ocean at this point. So so, yes, there'll be competition, but there's still still a lot a long ways to go before we we bottom this out.

I think we've got a few decades before we've we become enemies anyway, and, who knows what can happen in that time. That was a very interesting, contrarian view. I enjoyed that one. Thanks for sharing that one.

Thank you.

Alright. So, Carl, massive thank you for joining us on the podcast. Really excited by the business that you're building. Again, if you if you haven't checked out Axlanti, you really should. They're moving incredibly quickly. They're a startup to watch. And, Karl, it's always a pleasure to speak to you, and thank you.

Thank you, Q. It's been an absolute pleasure. Enjoy the discussion.