Zach Dell

You can do some really interesting optimizations if you're able to control other electric appliances that ultimately are just there to save the homeowner money.

Back to affordable, reliable.

That's what matters.

Lower the bill, keep the lights on.

That's our North Star today.

Back to the point of electricity as a commodity industry, commodities have boom years and bust years.

There's a couple of things that drive it.

I mean, a big one here is weather, which is kind of notoriously unpredictable.

As we discussed earlier, a big driver of power prices in ERCOT is home HVAC.

So if it's crazy hot in the summer and if it's crazy cold in the winter, you're going to see massive power demand.

And if that weather doesn't show up, power demand is going to be lower.

A big dynamic here also is just supply and demand or price signals, I would say.

It doesn't always play out as simply as I'm describing it, but in 2023, you had a massive year for batteries.

The weather was really intense.

Prices were really high.

Batteries were extremely profitable.

And so in theory, you see a ton of battery buildup.

Battery developers are saying, oh, batteries are super profitable.

2024, you had the opposite.

The weather didn't show up.