BESS Revenues and Crypto's Surge in Demand Response with Ali Karimian (Market Optimization Director @ GridBeyond)

Until last year, Texas, ERCOT, like every year was like Christmas. This year, there were some changes in regulations at how ancillary services were being dispatched in the market and they depressed prices. ERCOT has always been a place that would surprise surprise everybody every now and then. A place that you're gonna have all of a sudden a major market volatility time and just make a lot of money for asset owners.

So ERCOT is gonna come back, especially with all the crypto assets that are being installed in ERCOT. That's a huge load addition. If there's a resource in PJM that's available right now or for the next three years, they can make a lot of money off of the capacity market. And there's an expectation that by two thousand and thirty, there's gonna be fifty gigawatt extra load coming in PJM than and there would be forty gigawatt of retirement.

So putting those together, there's a huge gap that generators have to fill.

Hello, and welcome back to Transmission.

Today, we're diving into the diverse strategies employed by operators of battery energy storage systems across some of the US markets. These approaches vary significantly depending on the regional markets they serve, the policies shaping their ISOs, and a host of other factors.

But it's not just storage making waves. Emerging players like cryptocurrency miners are becoming active participants in US energy markets, contributing to grid stabilization efforts.

Joining us for this episode is Ali Karimyan, market optimization director at GridBeyond. Ali explores the evolving trends in energy operations and markets and unpacks how crypto mining is becoming a vital piece in the grid stability puzzle.

As always, if you're enjoying the podcast, please hit subscribe so you never miss an episode and give us a rating wherever you listen. Let's jump in.

Ali, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

So, this is the second time we've had someone from Grid Beyond on. We're gonna talk about how batteries make money in a few markets in the US, which is, of course, right up our street. And we're also gonna talk about crypto miners doing DSR, which is and then we had Jamie McCavity on on the podcast, I don't know, twenty episodes ago, and it was absolutely, incredible, that that conversation. So really looking forward to talking about that as well. Ali, before we get started, how long have you been at GridBeyond, and, can you just give us a lowdown about what you do there before we jump straight into the detail?

Yeah. Happy to be. I've been with Great Beyond for a year and a half. I started the company I started at the company mainly to develop, the optimization side of front optometre batteries in the US. And now my team is also responsible for optimization in Japan. So I would really wanna think of it as North America plus Japan.

And the team that we have is responsible for developing like, making money, making money for batteries that are located in these jurisdictions.

Okay. So you're doing optimization in Japan from the US, or you're doing optimization in Japan in Japan?

I think you're asking some security questions over here.

The team that the bulk of the data science team, is in Ireland.

And the rest of, data science team is, we have some people in Vietnam, some in, West Coast, Midwest, and I myself on the East Coast. So people are really everywhere.

So Grid Beyond are, of course, very famous in the demand side response DSR space. Yeah. And then now you guys optimize batteries around the world and, do lots of edge technology stuff, which is very interesting. But let's let's focus let let's frame this discussion.

Right? So we're gonna talk about the first half. We're gonna talk about how batteries make money in ERCOT, California, and PGM, and, that's gonna be a fascinating discussion. And then we're gonna talk a little bit about crypto miners as emerging participants in the market and what you guys are doing in that space, which will be very interesting too.

So let's talk about batteries to begin with.

What's Grid Beyond doing with batteries in in California, in PGM, and Texas?

You know, we have a whole, host of offerings that we have for, like, different types of players. Like, we have we essentially provide an a la carte menu. If somebody if there if it's a huge company, they have a portfolio of batteries or any other type of asset. They just wanna buy forecasting from us, or they just wanna buy a platform from us.

We provide that. If they have their own in house trading team. If it's a company that they wanna have some help from us with trading, we also provide that. And there are also companies that, they can be pretty large.

They have a portfolio of batteries usually around the world.

And they, for example, have a new installed battery in ERCOT or Caisio. They don't wanna hire a new trading team. They'll hire us. Like, we are make money off of the battery for them. They don't have to worry about anything, and we just gotta cut on cut off the revenue.

And so on a on a battery front, we're talking about grid scale batteries. Right? We're talking about front of the meter systems.

Absolutely.

And you guys, they give you the keys to the asset. It's the optimizer, model. Right? Give you the keys to the asset, and you guys take a cut, and you get paid more if you make more for the client.

And so and what's your organization look like then? So if you're building if you've got market access in ERCOT and California and PGM, and you're you've got different trading strategies for these these markets, what does the organization look like? And I say that because I think about, folks, you know, other optimizers, who like Habitat, for instance, who have been very successful in ERCOT, but it's just so much work to do these additional new markets. And they will they will get coast to coast, no doubt, but it just it takes so long because because it's so, so hard to do and to do properly.

And that that's not me. There's no there's no diss there. There's no diss on Habitat or anyone. Just I'm just it's a comment on how complicated and disparate these markets are. So how are you guys doing that in three markets already? Do you have a really big team?

We don't. I think we are really good software programmers first, first and foremost, and then we are also power traders. Like, as an as an example, like, my own background is I have a PhD in machine learning, and then I worked in financial markets. I worked in renewable energy companies, and now at Great Beyond. I've done power trading. So I have both backgrounds. We have a really good team of, software people that they're extremely good at what is called, object oriented programming.

So when we started programming, and ERCOT was the very first market that we started right in our platform for. Like, we had this in mind that everything is done in object oriented way, meaning that like, think of it as, like, you wanna build a car. If you wanna build a car, let's say you first build a Mercedes class c, and the next thing you wanna build is like a BMW, let's say, just series six.

Like, one way is that you when you when you're done with your series c, you're gonna start from ground up and go to your BMW.

The other way is that you create modules when you're working on your Mercedes Benz, that those modules can you're making them general enough that you can customize it to build your next car. That may that may be very different. For us, it's a similar story that we have this in mind that all of these markets have a lot of similarities and at the same time, a lot of differences.

So what would be, like, if we're writing classes in a programmatic way that we can write this whole platform for ERCOT, and then we wanna tweak it as minimal as possible to take it to Kaiso, to PJM, to Japan and all the other ISOs that, like, I think next we are gonna go also to New York and Nepal.

We can do all of these expansions pretty quickly because the platform that we have written is extremely, customizable.

And at the same time, our team is really hardworking. Everybody is very passionate about what they do. Everybody really wants to do good quality work all the time, and they put the energy into it.

It's I don't know. Just I find it it's remarkable because we, so our experience at Modo Energy, not to go off tangent here is but a lot of what we do is building models, right, and, and forecast long term forecast.

And we do that so people can go to the bank and they can raise money or they can value their asset or whatever. And, I I I don't take that like that. I don't mean whatever as in whatever. I mean, as in this is a big big piece of work.

And so, for us, about half of our company is working on that, and, we don't even interface with the market. Right? So we build a dispatch we we build, we forecast power curves, and we build dispatch models that simulate battery behavior in different markets. And even that, we we we don't even interface with the actual market.

We're not submitting trades. We're not doing, we're not we're not moving money around. There's no, you know, there there's there's lots of ways where our job is less less challenging than the folks who are doing the actual optimizing. Sure.

We're within this nice safe box of MODO Energy. And even then, you know, the the the capital expenditure to build our models is just eye watering. If we knew how hard it was to build a model for ERCOT in California before we started doing it, we may not have chosen to do it, to be honest. And, and so then I look at I look at other optimizers like GridBeyond who are somehow in so many different markets, and it just blows my mind.

It blows my mind because I I don't know. Maybe we're doing something wrong or, maybe we go to a different level of detail. I don't know. But we we found it quite different, you know, and, we found each market to be very different, and, we've had to rewrite the rule book pretty much for every every mark.

We we were hoping that we could build eighty percent of the model and then twenty percent on top, you kind of tune to each market. And what we found is, you know, what you can cross over between Great Britain and and ERCOT is very little. And the same between even two markets that look similar, like ERCOT and California, we found we've had to there there's there's so much, rebuild that goes on between markets. So just a comment really that, I look at optimizers like you guys who are in Japan and lots of lots of states in the US and across Europe, and it just blows my mind.

I agree with you. It's I I think it really helps that, like, a couple of senior people at their company, they've had experience with different ISOs to begin with, like, including myself. Like, I before joining Great Beyond at Constellation, I was active in PJM, Nepal, and New York as, I supported a trading desk over there for wholesale site. And went to Key Capture Energy. I was in charge of the ERCOT trading not in charge of ERCOT trading desk, but helped over there. And, we have other people at the company that they're very experienced. They've been active in the UK market, in the Ireland market.

And just this whole experience of people coming together knowing the commonalities, it really helps with starting to work on that object oriented program in the way I said that you can like, if you have a very good starting point that you know what needs to be tweaked, next time that you're working it for another market, it's gonna be faster. Like, what we came up with was that I put it for our ERCOT platform. It took us almost a year, a full year, to write AirCut from scratch. Once we did AirCut for Kaiso, it was, I would say, six months.

For Japan, it was four months. And my guess is that when when we wanna do this for New York or New England, it's gonna be around two to three months. Like, we are at the point of seeing so many different models knowing what are the questions to ask. Because to me, that's always a big one.

Like, nobody is an expert in everything.

A huge part to us is when we're entering a new market, just even knowing what question to ask and finding people that are really good at answering those questions quickly for us so that we can hit the ground running as fast as possible and just, build our platform in the new market.

So let's talk about markets that batteries operate in and, which markets are attract can we just do, like, a high level overview of which markets are attractive for batteries to operate in, especially in the three that we're talking about, so in Texas, California, and PGM?

So Texas this year had a really bad year. Everybody knows that. I'm sure you're aware of this. Until last year, Texas aircuts, like, every year was like Christmas.

People had, people could pay off their batteries in two to three years. It was amazing. This year, there have been multiple factors. We had a webinar on this, like, in short, Sure.

Like, everybody talks about weather and renewables, but also, like, there were some changes in regulations at how ancillary services were being dispatched in the market, and they, depressed prices.

I don't think if ERCOT is gonna stay low forever, ERCOT has always been, as far back as I know, a place that would surprise surprise everybody every now and then. A place that you're gonna have all of a sudden a major market volatility time and just make a lot of money for asset owners.

So ERCOT is gonna come back, especially with all the crypto assets that are being installed in ERCOT. It's a huge load addition that will just help the prices be volatile and high enough that if somebody's installing a battery, they're gonna get they're gonna make their money.

Caiso has been a more stable place because they have a resource adequacy program. People do get paid usually for ten years, but they have they've hedged their a big chunk of their revenues for ten years. And that helps them not be in panic mode if one year they are not making enough money in the in the market. It's one of those places that I haven't seen a company that gets widely rich off of their batteries in Kaiso.

But people do well because of resource adequacy. It's a it's a place with nice returns. PJM is a very interesting place. Until just this year, that capacity markets had a major change.

Like this year, for people that have followed, PJM has a construct called capacity, in which the market procures, generation to be available whenever they're called. Capacity markets until this year was not as lucrative. Prices were clearing low. PJM made some changes in how they procure capacity and formulas that they use for market clearing price.

And all of a sudden, prices are clearing really high. So if if there's a resource in PJM that's available right now or for the next three years, in the next three years, they can make a lot of money off of the capacity market. The view that we have and a lot of other people have is that this is going to continue for the foreseeable future, and that goes to two factors.

Like, there's an expectation that by twenty thirty, there's gonna be fifty gigawatt extra load coming in PJM, then and there would be forty gigawatt of retirement. So putting those together, there's a huge gap that generators have to fill.

However, PJM is a little bit tricky. Like, there is an extremely long interconnection process. In ERCOT, it takes around it's it takes less than two years. The time that you apply to be connected to the point that you receive your approval that, yes, now you can build your asset. In PJM, from the time that you enter the queue to build, to even apply for interconnection to the time that you come out, even before any construction starts, just the approval is four years. So if you're going now, you're gonna come out of it in twenty twenty eight or twenty twenty nine.

PJM has been very slow. That so now it's really good for operating batteries absolutely. But how many operating batteries are in PJM? There are very few.

Very few. We we do have positive, outlook on PJM. Like, a lot of projects are now penciling in PJM both behind the meter and front of the meter.

And we expect people to have, like, payback in the range of five years, even some areas such as mid Atlantic. I live in Maryland, Baltimore.

Here in BGE zone, capacity prices are clear really high, and Dominion, Virginia.

In both of these places, like, if you have a battery behind the meter or front of the meter, it's gonna pay off very soon. Very lucrative.

And I know you asked about PJM, Kaisao, and ERCOT. Like, one other place that we entered, as I said, was Japan. Japan is an extremely interesting place. It just shows how much these markets can be, unexpected.

Take it from the top. Tell us, act like we know nothing about the Japanese power market. And, yeah, tell us like we're five year olds. What's what's the state of the market in Japan at the moment?

The state of market in Japan right now is it's bimodal.

For a huge group of people that participate in the market, there are utility companies that are a lot of them are state owned.

They their mandate is not to make money, so they're supporting and they're providing power at essentially at their cost.

And there is a very small percentage of the market right now that, are private owners, and they are open to they're just starting to participate more. And that's just because Japan, they opened the market. First, they opened it to energy in late twenty nineteen ish. And then, earlier this year, it was just April of this year, that they opened the ancillary service market to new participants, like, to essentially, any way that is not a utility. They are not state owned. Like, people like us, as long as you have or you, if you have a battery, you can participate in the market.

And It's a really thin market, though, isn't it?

The ancillary services market.

You would think so. However, like, the amount that, the Japanese ISO wants to procure is still way above how much is actually available.

So the because of that, price is clear really high. And in fact, there is no clear one very interesting difference between Japan and, American market is that in America, the price that everybody gets paid is the cleared price. And that seems, pretty obvious in the American construct that, like, for example, let's say you and I are both participating in the market.

You provide, let's say, offer capacity for fifty bucks a per megawatt hour. I offer it for, let's say, a hundred. If market clears at forty, both of us are gonna get paid forty. You get paid at a clear price. In Japan, energy is paid as cleared. However, capacity, ancillary services are paid as bid, which means that as long as you're cleared, you're gonna get paid exactly how much you were bid. So it's a game theory of you wanna bid as much high as possible as long as you know that you're gonna get cleared.

I miss those dates. We used to have ancillary services used to be procured like that a long time ago in the UK, And it was it was crazy. Right? Because you also, these are back in the day, these were, in some cases, two years or even up to thirty month contracts for what was FFR at the time.

And, yeah, it wasn't pay as clear, and you got this Excel sheet once a month to figure out who got what contract. And you could have the same for the same service, you know, one project was getting fifteen quid, twenty quid a megawatt an hour, and the other one might have been getting four pounds. It was tragic at times. And it was because it wasn't very liquid, there weren't that many participants.

It was very difficult to optimise your bidding. Everyone thought they had some sort of edge. But I think looking back, how could you when you only get feedback on a on an auction once a month and, there's only, say, fifteen, twenty bidders? But, anyway, that's I do I do miss those days because it's like the wild west.

And in It is. Illiquid markets, there is an argument that the cost of the end procurer or consumer is lower in payers bid markets, because so many people miss out. So many bidders are desperate to win contracts. I get the argument for PayersClear.

I think they call it Dutch auction, don't they? PayersClear makes sense if everyone's bidding at their marginal cost, and it should drive it down for everyone. In thin, illiquid markets, you can make an argument the other way. So Japan, did they choose to do that recently, or has it always been that way?

It's after March of twenty four twenty four. It's very recent. Wow. Exactly. As you said, so good for them, good for everybody.

That's new there. So we're saying two different things. One of them is, a huge chunk of the market are, again, state owned utilities. They are they are offering their capacity at very low price at their cost, and that's what a huge chunk of the ancillary services are gonna be procured at.

However, there are also other providers that are more recently entering. Right? That they get clear that and demand response also, by the way, can participate. So you can have as a load, you can participate, and you can make a lot of money a lot of money in Japan right now.

One of the very interesting phenomena that we've seen is that some of these companies, like Japanese battery companies even, that they have installed batteries because they were they installed them to test their battery technology.

Now they're bringing those test batteries to the market because, like, now all of a sudden, like, they installed that, like, let's say, five years ago because they were testing a new technology, but they can make a lot of money off of it, off of a test plant that they never expected to make money off of.

Awesome. Yeah. And so that's a a whistle stop tour of those markets. Right? And how how much of your time is spent in doing US stuff versus Japanese stuff?

Japanese stuff, at this point, is very cyclical because we have two battery projects coming online in spring in Japan.

We also have a huge project coming online in Kaiso in the spring, and we have, a decent portfolio coming online also in ERCOT in spring. At the same time that we're always, like, making sure that for our current customers, everything that we're doing is, like, really top of the line and as best as can be done.

I don't think if it's as easy as saying that a ten percent or twenty percent of my time is on Japan.

One thing that I can say is that all the calls happen at late at night, and those are brutal. Brutal for my daughters, for my wife, everybody.

Oh, no. No.

Well, I'm sorry to hear that. We just opened an office in Sydney, and we, so we've got a few people in Sydney. And it's the we do a company all hands, which is what it says it is on the tin. Right?

Everybody in the company is on a call, and there's loads of high fives and welcoming new joiners and, you know, all the good stuff. It's really important to invest in that when you're in multiple places. But then we now we've got these folks in Sydney, and there isn't a time. If you work if you are working hours on nine till six, there isn't a time where you can schedule it where everyone can join it.

So we have this kind of northern hemisphere all hands now, and we gotta figure out a way to somehow either bend the space time continuum or find some other way of making everybody feel included. Maybe we'll take it in turns or something. But, yeah, it's really tricky to run a business in that many time zones. Anyway, we digress.

So as somebody who knows an awful lot about these markets, could you give our listeners a a heads up on any policy or regulatory changes that you think are gonna be really big in these markets that's coming up in the next couple of years or so?

Yeah.

Let's start one at a time.

ERCOT, the big one is closer to the end of this year, next year. They're gonna have, a whole new framework for how they're gonna procure ancillary services and energy. Like, they're calling it RTB plus. It's real time battery optimization framework that's they're essentially are gonna have an ancillary service market in real time as well.

Because in ERCOT currently, there is no the only market for ancillary services is in the data head. In California, it's a different story. California has also real time and data head. So so does PJM.

So once ERCOT, implements that, I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of new paradigm shift in the market that, at this point, we believe we have a good grasp of them. We believe that we are ready. At the same time, there are always gonna be, challenges that will come to anybody, even to the most ready people.

When it comes to PJM, what what comes to my mind is mainly, now regarding capacity markets. There's a dance created that for years, generators have not been happy with at the with the price that capacity market has been clearing at. Like, they thought it was very low.

And now that it's at a level that generators are happy, consumer protection groups are not happy because they rightfully say that, well, this this price of capacity is always coming from ratepayers.

And in fact, I believe I read very recently that the expectation is next year, electricity prices, in my hometown of Baltimore are gonna go up by twenty percent. And twenty percent is a big chunk, like all of a sudden getting added to your energy bill.

So now consumer protection groups are advocating for ways to bring that capacity price down.

We don't think if that's gonna happen, mainly because with all of this load retirement loads going up and generated retirement, it's really hard to imagine there's something to make up for it. There's an, like, all of a sudden added generator from Saint Eire to make up for this.

But anything that gets into politics of populism and popularity with consumers, there are always this added dynamic of, we don't know what's gonna come next.

And in Kaiso, I can't think of anything. They're they're always making some changes. Kaiso is very dynamic. They're always updating something with their batteries, with, like, how they, for example, deploy ancillary services or even how they publish information.

As of now, we don't think if there's gonna be a major shock to anything.

Okay. Yeah. The PJM story is a big one, isn't it? Because there's just so much industry in PJM that is so, vulnerable to changes in power prices.

There's the consumer side for sure, but, it really is a an industrial heartland in PJM.

And, yeah, I I can see why it's becoming political. And, yeah, capacity forecast as well look like it's gonna continue for for a while, which is really exciting from a generator's perspective.

But you can have too much of a good thing, can't you? And, things can swing back to the way. Alright. Let's, let's move on from batteries for a second. I wanna talk about crypto miners because you've spent a bit of time in this space. And, out what we find is whenever we talk about crypto mining, the the the amount of attention this gets in our podcast, not that we do things for clicks and likes, of course, but we do like a bit of dopamine every now and again.

Whenever we talk about crypto mining, it's just something something goes off in people. They love it. And so for you, you've been looking at crypto miners as participants in power markets and a few different strategies they can take. So, before we get started there, I mean, we're mainly talking about ERCOT here. Right? So, could you just talk for a second about the characteristics that make crypto miners suitable for, for grid stability?

Yeah.

I also wanna make it clear that when it comes to crypto miners, what we have come across is that there are two types of crypto miners.

There there's a whole category of crypto miners that they're usually companies that they own a facility and they rent out the capacity to mine, let's say, Bitcoin on their facility.

Those are types of facilities that they usually have very strict availability con constraints. Like, meaning that they say, like, ninety nine percent of the time, facility has to be available.

Those types of facilities, there are fewer opportunities for them to make money, by participation in the power market.

Of course, like, they can always, like, install a battery behind the meter and, like, there are always there are always ways for any type of facility to find added revenue.

The best type of facilities that we work with, and they can definitely make a lot of money by participation in power markets, are people that own the facility, and they mine the Bitcoin or any other crypto asset on their own. So they don't have anybody else that they have to report to about availabilities.

And by the way, like, when I'm talking about availabilities, most of these strategies that we optimize, they have, like, ninety seven percent, ninety six percent availability per year. It's not that, like, we're gonna all of a sudden put a huge block on the facility.

But even the capability to say that I have some flexibility.

Instead of ninety seven percent, I can be ninety six percent, ninety five percent available, and I don't have to be responsible to a stakeholder.

That opens our hands very much in helping them with, lower essentially, we are lowering the effective power price. Right? Because, like, they are there is a power price that they are paying. And if we can find other ways for them to make money in the market that brings down their effective cost of electricity, which for a Bitcoin miner is the largest expense.

I would say, crypto miners are generally fast to respond. They are not extremely fast. They are not like batteries. They have a ramp up and ramp down rate.

Because of that, they can participate in ECRS, RRS in air cut, and non spin, not regulation. Regulation is like you have to be faster for that. And one huge distinction is that, if you are a controllable node or non controllable node. Like, most of crypto miners are non controllable node, meaning that the only decision to be made is zero or one. Like, thinking of it as like a switch, that's connected to a light bulb. If it's non controllable, you only have two options. Either if it's on fully or you just turn it off, shut it down.

A controllable load is a situation that's like, you have a dimmer. You can dim the light bulb if you need to. And with controllable load, you just have more opportunities to participate in the market and make more money, which comes at the expense that, now you have a little bit less control on how you're you're running your facility because, with changes in the frequency on the grid, you're providing reliability to the grid, and you just have to be more flexible.

Yeah. One of the things that's interesting about I talk mainly about Bitcoin mining because, I'm fairly opinionated on anything that's not Bitcoin. But, the the the cool thing about it is your settlement period is is basically ten minutes. Right?

Because it's a new block every ten minutes. So your your load is essentially just calling load. There's there's there's some core power, but it's generally calling somewhat hash power, but most of it's calling. And then, you're looking at a ten minute on and off time, really, and you wanna be on to to hash for as long as you can within a ten minute period, which syncs quite nicely with, a lot of power markets.

So so we there's a there's a ton of, data center and crypto loads coming on or Bitcoin mining load coming on in, in ERCOT right now. What about the other markets?

Are we seeing, big build out in California and PGM in the same sort of way and Japan? Or I mean, the the exceptional thing about ERCOT is the low base load power prices because, you know, your your your dollar per kilowatt hour or cent per kilowatt hour is just so low in Texas, and especially in West Texas where you can access a lot of negative pricing. So, what about these other markets? Are are they attractive, and is there much activity happening there?

Yeah. We've seen some good activities in SPP specifically, like Indiana, North Dakota, South Dakota.

Power prices, like, construct over there is also very good. Like, a lot of these large companies that they started in, like, China or even Norway. Now they have, in Texas, South Dakota, facilities that they're all pretty profitable for them. And one thing that I forgot to add about these strategies was that, like, they can also provide out of the money call options.

That's something that, like, many people don't think about. And the concept is that if you have a facility that you can shut it down when power prices are high, you can, even be which is something that a lot of people do. There is nothing novel about that. It's called high price avoidance.

Right? That's very obvious. Like, our prices are high, just shut it down.

However, you can sell this as a service. You can sell this as a service even one year in advance or one season in advance. You can sell the right to shut down your facility as a call option.

And usually people that are on the other end are people that need to buy the call option because they have a load book. It can be like a utility or it can be a low serving entity.

And after storm Yuri, it's been pretty hard. Like not everybody underwrites call options, out of the money and haircuts anymore because everybody is really afraid of that fat tail that can happen.

And now that crypto miners there are few crypto miners that are sophisticated enough to know how to do this and how to manage this because, like, there are risks that come with this. And that's, by the way, something that we do help people with, like, both for selling their call option and managing it, managing their crypto so that they don't have to worry about what they sold.

That they can really make a lot of money on essentially bring the effective cost of electricity down.

As conceptually, what's happening is that you're selling volatility, Like in an option word, you're selling the volatility of volatility of power prices.

And Yeah. There's a premium for that. It's like selling insurance. You're selling insurance.

So looking to the future, thinking about battery and or crypto mining, where are the opportunities that you guys are seeing, and what where are your clients, focused on at the moment?

Right now, a lot of people are excited about DJM. A lot of people. Like, we have a lot of, like, similar to what you described as the arm of your business that you sell bankable forecast for people.

We have a similar arm of the business that we provide long term project evaluations.

And in PJM, as of now, we see a lot of demands for people coming over for both behind the meter and front of the meter. And we also have a side of our business that we provide behind the meter batteries, our own financing, and because we are also scheduling coordinator, like, we essentially bonded everything. Like, it's a one one place shop, just, like, get everything from one place.

PJM, especially mid Atlantic region, because capacity prices are so expensive.

Right now, if you have a battery in, you can easily look at, like, a payback of two to five years. And that's that's pretty amazing.

So the mid Atlantic region is where it's at right now?

That's Maryland and Dominion, Virginia as of now.

Very cool.

Alright. Now on to the last two questions. My favorite questions. So the first one is if there's if there's anything you want to plug now is this is the grid beyond sales pitch or you wanna announce a big project or, project or or or products, this is your chance to do it.

Yeah. You know, we are very excited. Like, we are into an agreement with a very large OEM, a battery OEM. And we are bringing in, essentially our platform to the physical capability of a project. Because so far, right now, all of the platforms, there's it's the role of a human. That as a human, you would know that, hey, I'm putting the this project on stress, or I should, like, provide less of high volatile type of products such as, like, regulation, up regulation down.

I don't wanna do the do this in, like, multiple days in a row because that may that may result in outage for the project, and I may just lose the whole project. That's a role of a trader. What we are doing, working with this very large OEM, is that we're gonna receive feedback from their projects, in real time. And, like, through the functionalities that we we both of our teams are building together, we wanna eliminate the role of that human trader and put everything on machines. That, like, the machine would decide that, hey. Now this is a time that, the bids and offers have to be more tamed or bids and offers can be more aggressive, depending on, like, how much trust you have that the project is gonna perform and not get into outage.

We are really excited about all of these areas that we're working at. I think I'm really excited with the whole team that we have.

Very sharp people, lovely to work with.

And every day that I work with them, I'm genuinely happy to start my computer and start chatting with them.

Alright. And, okay, now onto my favorite question. This is where all the naughtiness comes out. This is the contrarian view. What's the thing that you believe, Ali, that not a lot of, ideally, less than fifty percent of the rest of the world believe, but as small as percentage as possible and as controversial as possible, please, if you will?

You know, I'm very it's not a contrarian view. What I am very excited about is, like, there are these melted metal batteries that people have been working on in lab, and, a few of them are getting commercialized. I'm really excited about them coming to the market and at some point, us managing them, because, like, as of now, like, when you're charging the battery, you're always expending energy. There are many situations like like, let's say, at the steel manufacturer. You have a ton of just excess heat that just goes to waste. If you can use that energy to charge your battery, that would be amazing. I think that's gonna be really helpful for these industries and just for global warming as a whole.

And this is also not a contrarian view.

However, I'm very excited about the role of big data. Like, a lot of people talk about big data.

At the same time, implementation of big data properly is extremely hard.

And we are spending a lot of time and energy on figuring out how to get all of these available data from different resources that are publicly available and just make more use out of them.

Not just obvious ones of, hey. Like, this is what ERCOT has published and this is it. Like, we really are trying to find other resources that are publicly available, and get more information for our asset management.

Alright. So a couple of things in there.

Using Heatbetter, I think, there's so much energy spent in HEAST. I wouldn't say wasted, but it ends up being wasted. So totally behind you on that. And then, yeah, there's a there's a big role that data's got to play. So, Ali, I wanna say a massive thank you for joining us on the podcast. It's lovely to have you on.

And we got we got some hot tips in there. You gotta check out the Atlantic region. I said the sorry. Atlantic region. Central Atlantic Atlantic region.

Mid Atlantic. Mid Atlantic.

Mid Atlantic. And, and lots of other stuff in there too that our our listeners are gonna find really interesting. So thank you for joining us on the podcast, and see you soon.

It was an honor and pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for listening to Transmission, a Modo Energy podcast. Transmission delivers conversations from industry leaders and experts exploring energy markets and the operations and technologies related to grid scale battery energy storage. Check out our other episodes by searching Transmission wherever you get your podcasts.

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