C (4:30)

Hey Shayl, thanks for having me.

B (4:32)

All right, so I want to start by having you walk me through your lens of a history on demand response in the us at least, because you've been in it for the majority of the time that that market has existed, I would say, or at least at any meaningful scale. And it's going through some pretty interesting evolutions right now where there are like macro factors that I think are driving it into a whole new category. But, but I think a lot of people are waking up to it now and they're either using that term demand response or a variety of other terms, demand flexibility, VPPs, maybe whatever, forget the term for, you know, paint me, the arc of the history of this market as you've seen it.

C (5:12)

Sure. And actually I'm going to even go back a little prior to my time, not to date myself here too much, but even before we had aggregators, which was really my entry into the space, utilities had interruptible programs and so the very, very early days of demand response, and whatever we want to call it across the course of time began as this kind of blunt, emergency only tool in those utility interoperable programs. So imagine making manual phone calls to very large industrials and then they would curtail their energy use, typically during a crisis. And so it was this almost like fire extinguisher used only in a crisis, a lot of times not used at all. And so that was the very, very beginning. And then my entry into the space came when I joined a company called Enernoc, which was one of the first aggregators I joined back in 2007. Eight time frame, that was when things started to evolve. I would say we went from the 1.0 or the 0.0, when it was the utility programs, into more of a 1.50 or 2.0, where the concept of aggregation became prevailing. The notion that a technology platform could do something started to emerge. And the folks that have been in the industry for a long time, you find a lot of people who used to work at Enernoc or Seapower, and now of course, Enernock is an lx. So that was really where I quote, unquote, cut my teeth, I guess. I was there for a while and I watched the market evolve. And I used to just think, gosh, if only more things could be connected. If only more things had an on off button that could be used with technology. If only pricing signals were more obvious, this stuff would get used more. And so there's a bunch of stuff that happened along the way, including some pretty wonderful FERC orders that opened up markets, and we can go into any of those if we want to. I'm assuming many listeners are familiar with orders like 719 and 745 that basically started to value the demand side the same way as a typical generation resource. So the signal started to be, yeah, if you could reduce a megawatt of demand, you should be paid the same as a megawatt of supply. And more and more aggregator and aggregation models came to be recognized that one plus one can be three sometimes, and that the value of a portfolio was there. And so over time, fast forward to today, I think Shell, my favorite part about our business these days is that at any given moment we're being dispatched. If I opened up our platform right now, there would be to 20 different dispatches going on. And so it's gone from this really kind of only extraordinary moment when the resource is used to being super ordinary. In fact, quite dull sometimes. If you think about it that way. I don't even know why you're having me on this pod if that's the case.

B (8:15)

But like super boring.

C (8:16)

Yeah, so boring. Like, but like, in all seriousness, that's the evolution that I've watched. And so I posted on LinkedIn a couple months back or a month back that hey, you know, by the way, one thing you might not know about our business is we're dispatched every day, 365 of the last 365 days. And I got this really overwhelming response of wow, I didn't really know that. And maybe that's the wake up call that you're talking about. But I'd love to unpack with you the reasons why that's true. Because it's a number of things. It's new use cases, it's market maturity, it's technology maturity, it's rising electricity prices, it's declining cost of the ders themselves, it's like all of those things. But the market's having a real moment now. And so that evolution has been really cool to watch. It's been really cool to be part of. And I'm really grateful that more people are coming into the space and realizing that maybe we're at another inflection point now. Yeah.

B (9:17)

So I think of there being. You could tell me there might be more than this, but there are three or four vectors through which the. The market has broadened over time since those early days of Enernoc or even before the aggregators. Right. It started off as being a pull switch in case of emergency situation that was called upon almost never. So now being called upon often in many different contexts. That's one, two is you said, you know, anywhere with an on off switch. But actually that was like that's been a shift. Right. Because initially as you said, it wasn't even, I guess it was an on off switch. But it's super manual. It was like utility calls large industrial plant manager, large plant and plant manager says okay. And like goes over to I imagine some, some switch in their factory and like pulls the dial and turns the thing down to it being much more automated. Now the third is the resources themselves, the demand side resources themselves, which as you said started with just like a small number of large industrials manufacturing facilities and now is, is much broader and sort of relatedly the resources that are at those sites. So it's not just straight demand reduction now maybe it's dispatching storage or whatever. So there's at least multiple. And in each of those ways it started from this Kernel of a very, very specific thing and it's become this much broader thing. I guess I want to ask on those last two in particular, how have you seen the evolution of who participates in these programs on the demand side? What did it used to look like and what does it look like today?

C (10:50)

Okay, so to reframe, I think what you just asked me, there's both more stuff. So to your point, there's more things with the on off button and importantly we should say that are connected to the Internet. Right, Right.

B (11:01)

Automatic on off button.

C (11:02)

Yeah. So there's just more stuff, there's more technology enabled stuff and stuff's a very technical term. There's more things to do with that stuff. In other words, there are more use cases. So we've graduated from capacity emergency only to the vast majority of use cases, sometimes being economic or balancing of renewables and ancillaries and local congestion management and things like that. We even have carbon based use cases. And then there's more need for this stuff because of what pricing is doing today and the fact that we've entered a new paradigm where we are in a load growth environment. But to expand your question, I think you were asking, you were asking about the customers themselves and why they care more. And this is, I've heard you talk about, well, it's no longer a vitamin, it's a painkiller. So maybe this, that too.

B (11:56)

But actually before that, who are the customers that participate? I mean I think that the expansion from its Jill Schmo running a factory to a pretty wide array today is interesting. So if I were to look at the Voltus platform today and the customer set on the platform, how would you, how would that pie be split?

C (12:17)

So to give you a sense, there'd be over 50 different verticals just within commercial and industrial. And then there'd also be residential. So going maybe smallest to largest, you'd see everything from an electric vehicle in a home to a smart thermostat to mom and pop kind of retail shops, big box stores, any kind of commercial load, school districts, wastewater treatment plants, on up through larger industrials maybe first larger real estate building. Commercial real estate is huge in particular in areas like New York, on up through industrials and on and on steel manufacturing facilities. Massive loads. Those are as a sidebar, the original large loads in my mind were like the paper mills and the steel mills and then there was crypto and now we're seeing the, there was always data centers of the traditional sort and then cloud compute and now we're seeing the AI data centers kind of at the top. So it really runs the gamut. And in many ways that's the strength of the portfolio. You can take things that maybe have operating parameters and constraints and pair them with other things or other customers that have similar but different constraints. And now you can respond to what the grid needs by tetrising these things altogether.

B (13:37)

Maybe staying within the CNI world for a minute, because I know this will be different for residential. Talk a little bit about the resources, like what is being dispatched, generally speaking.

C (13:46)

Yeah. So it's still a lot of load control on top of things that are now what we would call behind the meter assets. So let's just talk load control for a second. The first thing we'll often do when we talk to a customer is take a look at their electricity bill with them and run through it and make sure that we're understanding how much energy are they using, what are their demand charges, which are sometimes a shockingly high portion of the bill. Anything that's drawing energy is eligible to be something that can use less energy. The more that things are connected to things like building management systems, the easier and more technology enabled this becomes. There's still a lot of take commercial condition space, just load control as a DER itself, as part of the vpp. And now we're starting to throw around the acronyms, but I fall into the all inclusive category. There's a lot of that. Then there's behind the meter assets. And that can be a generator behind the meter. It can be battery storage. Increasingly, battery energy storage systems are one of our top growing verticals. And that just relates to the basics of the cost curve coming down. So that's everything. It really runs the gamut.

B (15:05)

Can you talk a little bit about geographies today? It's sort of national to an extent now and thanks in part to those FERC orders that you described that happened a few years ago. But is there significant concentration in some regions over others? Is there a significant pricing differential in terms of the value capture in some regions over others, or is it all pretty uniform?

C (15:25)

Let me answer volume first and we'll come back to pricing because they're slightly different answers. We very intentionally built the company thinking that we want it to be in every wholesale market in every territory eligible across North America. So that is true. Today we have some markets that have emerged as just larger than others, but it's by and large owing to the size of those markets. So you'll have your PGMS and ERCOT in New York and SPP being bigger than for example, the Canadian markets. But that's because of percent penetration against the peak load, not because that we've really seen that one market is where we're going to concentrate and that's a business choice for us. There's other aggregators you'd ask that say they're heavy in one market or another. But because of the second part of your question, pricing. Pricing can get a little crazy out there. Anyone who's watched the PJM auction for years knows that. Well, one year you think it's happening and then the next year it's this. And it goes back and forth and you might find a trend line over time. But if you're trying to run a business, it's really, really, really hard. The best way is to adopt more of a portfolio. We have a portfolio of portfolios and that's how we've built. The business is approaching it through the lens of the actual risk management and the fact that we are exposed to the pricing and that things can change. Long ago I gave up the game of trying to predict where auctions would land. It's just not. Instead, we have a saying internally that we just would like to be happy with our participation in all outcomes. So whether it's up, down, left, right, certain things are outside our control. But the way we manage it is being everywhere. So we're everywhere, Shell?

B (17:04)

Yeah, you're everywhere. Point taken. Is this a market? This is going to vary by region too. But is this the type of thing where you earn most of your money on a few days out of the year? I mean, maybe this is yet true in ercot, not true in somewhere else. But like, to what extent is this a, you need to be there to dispatch on the hottest days and the peakiest load days versus A, you're like, the cash flow is steady daily over the course of the year or seasonal or something. Like what does the profile look like?

C (17:34)

Okay, so brace yourself. I'm going to answer with a lot of it depends. So it depends, I'm braced. It depends. It depends. So I'd say over time the trend is that this stuff is getting smoother for a couple of reasons. One, like this notion that like the summer hottest, peakiest day is like the end all be all that that's gone, that was 1.0. So we have winter peaks, we have shoulder issues because of outages and things like that. And so just even like across the year seasonally we are seeing a spreading, a smooshing out of the value. And so when you're talking capacity or even Reserves. And let's put energy aside for a second. When you're talking capacity or reserves, both of which are more or less call options on energy, you're getting paid for being there during the time of need and the option.

B (18:23)

Right. And that's like an annual auction, right?

C (18:25)

So that's annual, biannual, there's seasonal, even talking reserves. If you just let's go to operating reserves for a second, that's daily, it's a day ahead or a real time market in some markets. And so there's an hourly price associated with providing reserves to a market that is pretty spread out. Little bit ebbs and flows here and there. Reserve markets actually can sometimes be higher in those shoulder seasons because of shortages of other resources. So that spreads it out. And then when you're talking about the energy payments themselves, we have a lot of customers who respond economically. And so it's only when pricing goes above X that they want to curtail because that's their threshold, that's their, what we call strike price. And so for those that's like you're clipping the peaks of pricing. And so you got to look at like, yes, if you're going to have a heat wave in the summer, there's going to be a lot of money made there if you have a polar vortex in the winter. But as a general trend, as a general observation, these things are getting spread out now. Layer on top of that, we're also seeing more of the what we would call traditional capacity programs being dispatched regularly. I lost count. It used to be that that would be crazy to not know how many times PJM dispatched ELRP this summer or New York dispatched their SCR Case Resources Capacity program. But it's again and again and again and again. And so the payments associated with those, the exercising of the capacity, those also become a little more spread out. So that's the trend. And like, that's part of why I come back to like, I love that. We're being dispatched all the time for a number of reasons. One, it spreads out the payments, which is good. But two, like think about exercising. This is a muscle that now becomes well used, well exercised. You want to keep it that way because at the end of the day, the thing that's most important is that we deliver. So as an industry, showing that not only does this stuff exist, not only can we build it, but when you call on it, it will show up is so incredibly important to us. We have these North Star principles internally and one of them is just deliver on our commitments to Grid operators. It's very basic and so the more we get used to, the more of a well oiled machine it can be.

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B (22:27)

You talked about PJM dispatching. I'm curious. I guess there's a broader question here, but it's sort of PJM specific. So PJM and the capacity auction that everybody started talking about a few months ago, you know, prices spiked again. Total demand response or load side participation in that market I think was relatively flat year over year. Anyway, I guess my question is at the high level, like what do you what is the rate limiter on the growth of whatever modern version of demand response there is? Is it? I think what changed in PJM in part was like the rules around capacity accreditation. You could probably tell me all the details there. But is the rate limiter achieving sufficient value from the grid operator? Is the rate limiter finding enough of the right customers on the demand side? Or what stops this from 10Xing tomorrow?

C (23:19)

It's all the above. It's all the above. So some of it is yes, the Higher the pricing goes, the greater the addressable market. Because now things pencil out for nearly 100 of things. Right. There's also just time. So how quickly I get asked this all the time, like, well, if you just had endless resources, how quickly could you do things? But there's still just a limiting factor of the time to just go out and do it. There's the rules. You alluded to the ELCC and all the accreditation changes. And so there was a lot behind the scenes, more than meets the eye around. Well, more total megawatts showed up, but because of the way they counted it, fine. I can't really speak for others. I mean, we grew year over year. So one of our takeaways was, okay, well that's great. We have more space now and so we're going to go out and have more to offer customers. And the last thing is, I do think people don't always keep in mind that it's not like one. It's not a one bite at the apple moment. So PJM has the forward auction, which is one way to procure capacity, and then they have their incremental auctions. So as you approach the delivery year, what will happen to pricing? And are people kind of, I don't want to use the word withholding, that's a bad word in the industry, but are people kind of just waiting to see and then go into the incremental auction? And this will come up as we get to the bring your own capacity concept. But there are others. There are other ways to procure capacity. And so I wouldn't also over rotate on that one signal that doctor Was flat year to year for one auction because of all this other stuff in the mix. I think in general, the sentiment in the market is one of huge optimism and excitement. I just came from some time at Climate Week last week where folks who are adjacent to the industry asked me like, ooh, how was that? Is everyone okay? Like, everyone's great. Everyone's great. There's a ton of optimism. Like I said, the market's having its moment and people are just excited to get to work. Now, are there things we could do? Yes. If I had like a magic wand, I would have better data access and some basic stuff that I think is within our power to enable even more growth in the sector.

B (25:39)

Better data access on the customer side, like load data, better access on the utility side to know when it's going to be dispatched. What's the data that would unlock something for you?

C (25:48)

Yeah. So when we think about like the residential portfolio, for example, so C and I, we go and we install either either there's a way to tap in through APIs and, and get customer data through something the customer already has, leveraging our API platform, or we go and we install what we, what we lovingly call our Voltlet device, which sits on top of the utility meter and streams real time data to our platform. But data is very important. When I think about the growth of our residential portfolio and what's, I think you used the term rate limiting there, it's the lack of access to. And I'm going to air quotes here for the listeners, smart meters. Right. So we deployed all these smart meters, we rate based them and then it's like, well can we please use the data from them? But no, in a shocking amount of territories, it's actually quite hard to gain access to that even if you are the consumer. And so there's some basic stuff around data access and unlocking some of the smaller assets that now pencil out. So some of this, it's now really worth it for smaller assets because of where pricing is. And so how do we make that happen? What's the rate limiters? There are still some regulatory tweaks, if you will, that I would like to see.

B (27:05)

So we've talked about this or versions of this a little bit before on the pod, but you made an announcement just this week of a new product. Basically this bring your own capacity product they're offering, which is suited I think to any large load, but presumably predominantly aimed at data centers where the problem is the most acute. Why don't you start by just describing what it is and then I have a bunch of thoughts and questions about it.

C (27:29)

Sure. So yeah, so we've been really excited about this. We've been talking about it to many folks for a while, but we kind of officially launched the product today. We had everything all buttoned up and what it is said most simply is we are offering a way that increases time to power for large loads. And yes, in this case we're really thinking about data centers, but nothing says it couldn't be other large loads by allowing them to pay for and fund and bring their own capacity to the table. How? Okay, so that's the next question. I took the words out of your mouth, but basically the markets already have very mature, well defined rules for what it means to be capacity. What is capacity in PJM is not the same as what is capacity in Miso or SPP or you name it. We have an accreditation process and we have a way to evolve that over time and at the end of the day, if the problem is generation capacity, let's define the problem. Let's say the problem is generation capacity. We don't have enough of it. Okay, great, well, so let's build it and let's allow the markets to govern how we're building it and how we're operating it and what it means to be capacity to meet the needs of that market reliably and let's let the load pay for it. So that's what it is. It's kind of taking what would traditionally be a bilateral agreement where load serving entities for a long time have purchased out of market, they've run procurements for capacity out of market and reduced what they need to go and buy in market. This is a, is trilateral a word but it's allowing the funding to come from the load itself. And so you're offloading the burden, the financial burden of the load coming to that area, but you're also offloading the risk. Because I hear a lot, well, like what if it doesn't get built? Or the concerns are we don't have enough capacity, what if it doesn't get built? And why should ratepayers pay for the large load coming to town? It's a win win in my mind because it allows the large load to come to town. The utility wants that and it gives the utility the capacity that it needs accredited by the market it's sitting in. Let's for a moment put on holds vertically integrated utilities and it's putting the funding on the part of the hyperscaler or data center developer. At the same time it's providing a signal to in this case VPP developers or voltes to build exactly in the area of the problem. And so that's why I love it. It's really an innovation on top of the markets today, which the markets today, which work for many, many things but are struggling to accomplish all of these things all at once with the new large loads everywhere.

B (30:26)

So like versions of this, the bring your own capacity thing have happened with data centers before. Right. I think. But it tends to be grid scale generation. Right. So you'll have a data center and this has been going on for years. Data center will go. There isn't sufficient generating capacity. The data center will, or the operator, hyperscaler, whatever will pay for new generation to get built, not necessarily on site. I think what's distinct and what we're starting to see now, what you're pursuing is a version wherein that's not like it's unlikely to be, at least in your program, a single CCGT natural gas plant that is that new capacity. It may instead actually be an aggregation of a bunch of demand side resources in that region. Right. And that's what's sort of distinct here from what we've seen historically.

C (31:14)

That's what's distinct, that's what's distinct. And so that would be bring your own new power plant and that would, that would be subscribing to the notion that if you're going to be bringing a new 247 load, that somehow you need to build new 247 generation exactly on that land parcel. So the other thing I'm trying to do is a little bit like broaden our minds on the term colocation. So sometimes it might be that you need to build exactly on that land parcel because you need a substation upgrade or something like very physical. Put that aside for one minute. Because increasingly what I see is that it's more. The constraint is a little broader than that geographically. So let's define the constraint. Let's just say it's at the balancing authority. So that's your constraint. So that's where you want to co locate. So this notion of like on site versus off site can be a little bit more flexible if you're willing to take into account the fact that as long as you're co locating at the constraint, that's solving the problem. And now you have more tools in your toolkit, inclusive of VPPs, inclusive of deploying more storage in that entire area where you need it. And that's like the Spark fund model of what they're trying to do. Right. So these concepts are all things that I think we're all talking about and we're all loosely agreeing that we need to solve these problems and we're loosely agreeing that the burden and the risk should lie on the large load coming to town. And what we're struggling with is how and so rather than point fingers and say like oh well it's you know, this, this, that or the other entity's fault, like I just wanted to, we, we wanted to introduce another solution that works today. And so that's why we, that's why we finalized the product and launched it and are psyched to be talking about.

B (32:59)

It, how does it actually work mechanically? Right? Like data center operator, developer going into a particular region, talking to the utility, trying to figure out what capacity there is there. At what point do you bring in the bring your own capacity concept and then is it a. Okay, we volta say all right, you need 100 megawatts of additional capacity in order to site your data center at the size that you want in this location. Utility or load serving entity, you tell me the aperture that matters. Is it the balancing authority? Is the deliverability window smaller than that? And Weavolt will go originate 100 megawatts of capacity from a variety of types of resources in the region or is it some other process?

C (33:40)

The earlier the better. So the sooner you can get in on the planning process, the better you want to be past the point of understanding what the problem is. So to your point, let's just say for sake of example, today the problem is some zone. Pick an ISO, pjm, ISO, let's just pick pjm. So the problem is in some zone and we're talking to a data center who wants to develop something in zone A. Well, the utility there says, well, I just don't have enough capacity in this zone. And the alternative is that they have to go buy it in the auction and it's going to be very expensive for everybody. Okay, great. Well, what if we built an incremental VPP in that territory and transferred the accredited, the PJM accredited market UCAP megawatts. So that was a mouthful. But like after all the accreditation stuff, after the who's it, what's it of, what type of resource it is, out pops a UCAT megawatt and it's called something different in every territory. But that's like the unit here. And so we go and we build those units and then we transfer it to the utility and there's no financial transaction there. The financial transaction is that the data center is paying for it. So the utility gets the capacity, the data center funds it, we go out and we build it. And incidentally, longer term price signals are great for building out VPPs. Just like any other resource. If you can have a 5 to 10 year price signal, you can do a lot with that. You can start financing more energy storage. There's just a lot of creative things you can do with that signal. And then the utility also gets to say yes to that load being cited in their, in their, in their state or in their region.

B (35:28)

Is the expectation that your answer to this is going to be it depends. I know.

C (35:34)

You don't even need to have me on this.

B (35:35)

I know. If I think about a resource stack, right, of what the data center operator can do to generate sufficient capacity to get their thing built, should VPPs be lower cost to them than new generation? In principle I would think so. But there's A customer acquisition cost associated with it. I mean there's infrastructure there that's non obvious. So I'm curious how it ends up stacking up for them and is it, and do you think of this as being a product as attractive largely because it is cheaper than whatever alternative they would have to get that capacity in that region? Or is it faster? Can you actually build it where realistically you're not going to build any new generation? What's the thing that makes this slot cleanly into the resource stack?

C (36:24)

Yeah, so it is faster, it should be more affordable. So the way we would price it is always looking at the alternative and being cheaper than that, it is cleaner. And at the end of the day, if you follow the money, the money goes back to the consumers and ratepayers themselves by participating in this program. So not only are they not there to go out, not only are they not receiving it on their bill, but they're also optionally participating in something that then pays them. So the whole experience gets better if you are the consumer or the ratepayer. But it absolutely should be more affordable if the alternative is going out and building a new natural gas power plant for one, not only are you going to like open up the catalog and see that it's backordered till 2020 or sorry, not 2020, 2030, whatever, which is a problem, you know, like that's on hold for many years. But they're expensive and so it should be more affordable, quicker, which is what everybody wants right now, and more sustainable, kind of better for the community. So it's just checking all those boxes, it is more complicated to talk about. So I think that that's the big challenge here is it's more complicated to talk about. It's more complicated to say hey, why would we solve Even if you could, I don't think we should solve what's fundamentally a utilization problem by just adding more steel. More steel. I really think it's critical that start thinking about there are existing resources on this grid already that we should be using. And this goes back to the Tyler Norris paper and all the great work out of Duke. It's the same thing as it was years and years and years ago. When to come full circle. I was first starting at Enernoc, which is we had these charts that showed, well yeah, 10, 20% of the capacity is built for less than 1% of the time. That just doesn't make makes sense. So from a macro market design society point of view, even if you could open the catalog and buy those power plants tomorrow. I still think that this would be a better outcome.

B (38:32)

All right, Dana, this was a lot of fun. Thank you for finally coming on.

C (38:36)

Of course. Thank you for having me.

B (38:39)

Dana Guernsey is the co founder and CEO of Voltus. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf. Mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacy is our executive editor. I'm Shayl Khan and this is Catalyst.