Zach Dell

So I think gas stations, grocery stores, quick serve restaurants, small commercial office buildings, these are massive consumers of power.

They should also have

onsite storage and solar.

And they should have smarter controls around charging and HVAC and those kinds of things.

So we think about the business as a technology company that is developing solutions to electrify the built environment.

We're starting with the home.

We think the commercial space is really interesting.

We're starting with storage.

We think solar is really interesting.

We think some of these other downstream products are really interesting.

But then if you look upstream at the utility and you look at substations and transformers, back to this utility incentive question and problem, the utilities have no incentive to go innovate on transformer design.

They're not R&D-led businesses.

The percentage of employees at a utility that work in R&D is sub 1%.

At the average tech company, it's 20%, 30%, 40%.

And the reason is because they're not incentivized to spend money on R&D.

They don't earn a rate of return on it.

They earn a rate of return on CapEx.

We think there's a ton of R&D that should be happening at the utility level, whether it's the transformer or the substation or the software by which they manage all these systems.

And as we partner with these utilities, Bandera Electric and Tectus and some others that we're working with in the state and some that we'll announce across the country over the course of the next year, we're learning a ton about how they operate.

And we're seeing massive opportunities for R&D in a place that's never seen it.