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- [00:04]
A
I'm told a good chef doesn't need to prep every single ingredient before they turn the hob on. Whilst one thing is cooking, they're chopping, seasoning or getting the next step ready. Energy Project development still works the slow way. Land environment interconnection permitting. Most developers tackle them one at a time, often handing each of them to a different consultant, then waiting months for reports. Eight in 10 projects do not make it through the company. PACES is built on a different approach. Runners work streams at the same time and development time can fall by more than a half. Stuart Pomeroy leads business development there, working with solo developers, data center operators and utilities all asking the same question. Why does getting a project off the ground take so long? This episode is about the hidden cost of delay in clean energy and what happens when you start to remove it. I'm Ed Porter. Introducing Alejandro Dodiego. Welcome back to Transmission.
- [01:09]
B
So Stuart, thank you very much for joining us today. It's great to have you here. Let's start by listening from you what your specific role is in the energy industry and what Paces you your company does.
- [01:21]
C
Yeah, happy to be here. Great to meet you. My role is I lead the business development team at paces. PACES is a software and development platform for utilities and infrastructure developers. My role has evolved over the last couple years. I have a background in project development and project finance and I'm bringing that on the ground experience to PACES to over the last six to nine months really stand up our utilities practice. So in addition to our work with ipps who are developing generation assets, we've also stood up a large load development business vertical and then also a electric utility business vertical. And that's a big portion of what I've been leading.
- [02:02]
B
Okay, great. If you would explain in very simple terms what Peytes actually offers to its clients, what would it be?
- [02:09]
C
Ooh, in a couple words I would say it is a development ecosystem and it's an anti point solution. So what I mean by that is when you think about the development process in very simple terms, you have to find somewhere to put whatever you want to build. You have to design whatever you want to build. You have to get the thumbs up, the approval, the green stamp from the powers that be in that particular region that says yes, you can build that thing that you just designed in the area that you want to build it, and then you have to go through building it construction and then you have to go through operations. The first half of that is what PACES is trying to support with better data, with automated tools and with a parallel process. So as opposed to doing one thing, 0 to 100% complete and then starting on the next thing 0 to 100%. And then the third thing, flip that and do those three or four different activities in parallel. So it condenses the time for development. And as I said, we're building the data pipelines and the tools to be able to do that faster.
- [03:16]
B
Understood. From your client's perspective, for what type of use cases would they hire you and how would they use your platform on a daily basis?
- [03:25]
C
Anything that results in steel in the ground, really. But more specifically, we have four customer verticals. We have generation developers and PACES is technology agnostic. So we support solar storage, geothermal, hydrogen and a variety of other low carbon generation development projects. Then we have load developers. So this is your data center, your advanced manufacturing, your hydrogen, some life sciences as well. Anything that's a large infrastructure project drawing from the grid. Batteries also apply to both gen and load. And then the third customer vertical is electric utilities. And then the fourth customer vertical is your financial services, capital markets and specialty real estate. And so folks are leaning on PACES to go through that development workflow, from finding the best location to build what they want to build to getting the first shovel in the ground across those different verticals.
- [04:24]
B
And how do you tell them what the best sites are? What type of data do you provide, in what form?
- [04:30]
C
Think of it like a layer cake. With paces, you have to start, you don't have to, but you can start with the physical viability of a particular project. Start with the land data, start with the parcel data, start with the environmental data, wetlands, floodplains, slope, that sort of stuff. Am I able to, with low risk, build the thing that I want to build at that location? Great. Next you want to look at your zoning permitting and land use. Am I going to be allowed to build the infrastructure asset that I want on that viable piece of acreage? Great. Now how big or how can I optimize that infrastructure project? Understanding the interconnection capacity, understanding on the distribution level, how much is available at that particular POI point of interconnect, or on a transmission level project, understanding how much you can inject or withdraw to the local system. And then there's a series of additional metrics on top of that. But those are some of the core, core features of paces.
- [05:25]
B
Now the audience is starting to get more colors on what your product is. How was the old way of doing the same thing? What is the value that you bring to the table to your customers that was not available before the old way.
- [05:37]
C
You can think of it as sequential and analog. So let's break that down a little bit. What I mean by sequential is if you were a infrastructure asset developer, either generation or load, but for simplicity, let's think about being a solar developer. You would start by identifying the land for your project. You could spend time in Google Earth, you could spend time in other GIS platforms, calling landowners, calling a broker, calling the county and trying to identify land. All of that information was going to be disaggregated. So some on the county website, some on our broker's website, some in Google Earth, some on Google Maps elsewhere. So really disaggregated parcel identification. Next, you would then rely on external consultants to do your environmental review. Is this in a floodplain? Is this impacted by wetlands? What's the forest free situation? Are there species that I need to take into consideration to develop a project on this particular parcel or group of parcels? So that's when your external consultants spend and reliance starts. Next, you would engage something pretty similarly on the interconnection side of things and say, hey, what is my interconnection opportunity here? How much does it cost? So you write a big check to an external power consultant who can then over a couple weeks and a couple months, give you an idea of what your power opportunity is. And then you do the same thing for permitting. And so again, that sequential process of you start with land and then you progress into environmental sometimes, then interconnection and then permitting, you do A and then B and then C, and you really don't start until the last one is completed. Again, relying on external consultants racking up your soft cost spend, racking up your external consultant spend. And with paces that is all brought into one ecosystem, one platform, in a data driven fashion, and the time is cut by 50% or more. How we do that is by parallelizing those different work streams. So as opposed to starting A and finishing A and then starting B and then finishing B and then starting C and then finishing C, you can start A, B, C, D, E through N, whatever your development process looks like, all at the same time. And so the result of that is greater efficiency in terms of your workflows. Because you can condense the time from 12 to 24 months to 6 to 8 months. You can reduce spend because instead of sending everything to external consultants, you can then do a lot of that same analysis in a more data driven fashion in paces. So arguably it's of a higher quality. In paces, your team can have a Higher throughput. So your business model is more efficient because your team is able to produce more megawatts or more projects per individual. And the result of that is more projects to completion at the end of the year, a lower cost per megawatt, which is great for any development team and any business CEO who's, who's concerned about that. And the net result for the system or the community is more low and no carbon projects and electrons flowing through the network.
- [08:57]
B
Okay, I see. When you mentioned consultants doing independent studies, environmental studies, impact assessment, interconnection studies, does your platform actually replace those studies or are they needed for those developers to later go to financiers and underwrite debt, for example?
- [09:17]
C
Yeah, there's a couple different elements. Some can be a full replacement, some are a compliment. So what do I mean by that? So for the first, which is environmental, oftentimes once you have your site identified, you then do an environmental screening. Right. And PACES has the ability to do a one click environmental screen. That's kind of a preliminary view of what is the constraints of this site. So developers can get that in a couple minutes from the platform as opposed to relying on an external consultant.
- [09:49]
B
High level assessment.
- [09:50]
C
High level assessment, exactly. And then PACES also has the ability to produce what's called a CIA or a critical issues analysis, which is a deeper dive look into permitting, land use, zoning and environmental diligence. So that's more on the later stage side of diligence. That is a complete replacement for something that would have been outsourced to a consultant. We can do that in a couple days with a greater amount of data accuracy for the developer. So that's a complete replacement and a better offering that we're bringing to the market. Yes, same thing on the power flow study side of things, which is a load study report either for, or I should say a power report for either injection or withdrawal. Normally those would be outsourced to an external electrical consultant. Take a couple months and five to six digits would show up on your invoice for that type of report. PACES is able to do that much more economically and in a, in a, in a one to two week turnaround. So it's a real disruption to the incumbent way of doing things, being able to get power insights for a transmission level project in one to two weeks versus one to two weeks or more.
- [11:06]
B
So you mentioned the cost saving. Well, the time savings. Time savings when using the product.
- [11:10]
C
Yeah.
- [11:10]
B
Do we have any other metrics about costs savings, success rates of projects at the beginning when originating or looking for new Sites. Are there any other metrics that you could share?
- [11:21]
C
Yeah, you can kind of break that down a little bit more. So if you think about the ecosystem and tools and data that PACES has made available for developers at their fingertips, pipeline conversion is one. So if you are a development shop, you may be looking at, your process might look like this. You identify 100 pieces of land that are of interest for your project. You then screen and say 50 of these are worth pursuing. And then 10 of those get through the next stage of interconnection or permitting, and you end up with 5. Right. You have a 5% completion rate on your, on your project pipeline from earliest stage identification all the way through the end. Now that might be a little bit extreme. Generally what we see in the industry is 10 to 15 or 20% completion rates. Our tagline is kind of the inverse. 80% of projects fail because of these sequential poor analog processes. And so PACES is an antidote or a relief to that super high failure rate of 80% with PACES. So say it's not five projects, say it's 10 projects at the end of the year, 100 to 10 with PACES, that same team of two people, five people, 50 people, whatever it is, can screen 500 sites. Using our software, PACES can identify those best locations for you, score them, validate them, say, yes, this meets your development criteria of 200 acres within a quarter mile of a, of an electric line, XYZ. And so you get from 500 initially screen, so 5x the top level screening, you get to 100 sites then that are viable against your criteria. And then because of the rest of the tools available in paces, permitting, environmental and interconnection, due diligence, you can convert a higher proportion of that hundred into projects. So you know, if the traditional model was 100 and you get 10 viable sites with paces, you might be able to screen 500 so that your hundred that you get to at the top are much higher quality. So then you convert, you know, 50 or 60 of that hundred to actual projects. So you go from 10% to 50 to 60% completion.
- [13:47]
B
Okay, great. Thanks for sharing those metrics. This is one question that potentially a lot of developers are interested in. One of the biggest issues when developing a product is assessing the risk and uncertainty. With paces, I understand that you can have a real time assessment of permitting, environmental zoning and different issues, but how do you assess future changes in policies or the likelihood of a landowner to lease the land on an area? Because you can screen for land pieces that fit within the parameters that you're looking for your plan. Right, but how do you assess the willingness of the landowners, for example, to lease that or the changes in policies and permitting?
- [14:32]
C
I wish I could read minds and understand what every landowner is going to do and every county commissioner, what they're going to put in place for their region. At the federal level. I'll answer the policy piece and then the landowner piece. Nobody has a crystal ball. So what you can do and what we try to do is stay as close to the market as possible. Talking with our customers, talking with our advisors, talking with folks in D.C. talking with folks across the industry. Right. And sharing notes and trading notes. What are you hearing? What are you seeing? Whether it's from the capital market signals that investors are bullish on one thing or bearish on another thing, ingesting those signals and saying, hey, how is our understanding of the energy transition world shifting week by week, month by month? So that's the first thing we try to do related to policy is keep really in touch with the market.
- [15:24]
B
And you embed that in your scoring system.
- [15:26]
C
No, this is, this is thematically how pace is how I think about leading the business development team on specifically paces and how we predict how we approach risk. Right. And the changing the fluidity of policy. We have a tool called Permitting Predictor. This is one of our flagship tools. What this allows developers to do is for a particular area, understand the policies that are currently in place and understand how that on a spectrum could impact their project. So some areas say permitting is black and white. There's a moratorium on solar. You cannot build solar for these dates. Right. And then there's a gray zone where it's a special use or it is potentially likely. You know, there have been town council, there have been meeting minutes released where folks are, some folks are in support of solar, some folks are opposed to solar. And so the result of a project going through that particular HJ authority, having jurisdiction, the approvers of permits issues or issuers of permits might be unclear. And then there's areas where it's approved, no questions asked. And so that policy spectrum of completely disallowed, no questions asked, completely allowed, no questions asked. Paces through our Permitting Predictor tool allows developers to understand is something 75% likely to be approved, 50%, 25%. And how we do that is by ingesting all sorts of policy related information. Okay, what do I mean by that? Meeting minutes, social media, a range of other signals from those policy and permitting entities. On the landowner piece, that's really hard. You know, landowners are not announcing every Monday what their plan for the week is for their land. They're not announcing every quarter. Yes, I am for sale. I am for sale or I intend to sell a portion of my land, right?
- [17:33]
B
Yes.
- [17:35]
C
And so the, the reason why I brought up the market trends, sharing notes across the industry piece is because that can give you a sense for what landowners, how they might act in the near future. So if there's a transmission corridor, if there's a grid corridor, that grid corridor upgrade that has been announced and there's been a fleet, you know, flocking of interest of data center developers and generation developers to that county, it's likely that landowners, five years ago, that might have been in the NIMBY camp, not in my backyard. I don't want any type of energy project or infrastructure asset built on my land. They might now be in favor of it. And so understanding the market trends can help you understand landowner actions. But a lot of it's psychology, a lot of it is really emotional, a lot of it is family ties. And so tracking market developments can be helpful for understanding landowners. But I don't have a crystal ball to understand what landowners are going to say. I'm for sale when.
- [18:35]
B
Thank you for sharing that. What you're seeing right now in the market, what are your biggest customer needs right now? What type of customers are making the biggest demand for your product right now, and where are you growing most? In which regions?
- [18:48]
C
A lot of questions there. Our customers are asking for accurate, simple, fast data. So a lot of them are growing out of that traditional development model, sequential analog, living in emails, relying heavily on external consultants and their PDFs and reports and stuff like that. So folks are saying, hey, I'm excited that all this data is available at my fingertips with paces. I'm excited that the tools can help my team move 50% faster. How do I start with one team and very quickly expand it into an enterprise engagement? And so they're saying, and how do I take the learnings from the last year or two years of using PACES and distribute it across my organization? And so what this looks like is both at IPP developers and load developers, these logos and customers are on our websites. We are working with one team. That experience is going extremely well. And then we're very quickly expanding to working with two, three, four other teams. And so that consolidation of resources in PACES is something that our customers really, really are excited about and love to, love to see, love to interact with that. Plus all of the. I kind of made an assumption here, but with the high Quality of data, high cadence of freshness of our data, easy to use tools. Flexibility of the platform to be able to support different development types. I mentioned the four different customer verticals earlier. So the flexibility of Paces, the speed with which their teams can move, the efficiency it creates within their organization, to not have dead projects, to have a lower cost per megawatt put into the ground, those are some of the things that our customers are most excited about. In terms of what are some of the big things that we're working on in conjunction with new customers. Modularity. So Paces has over the last couple of years built an incredibly powerful suite of tools. Some customers over the last couple months have said, hey, I really want this piece of that and this piece of that. Okay, cool. Let's think about how to make features and data within Paces more modular so that it can better complement your process. That's one thing that we're focused on. Another thing that we're focused on is enterprise level integration. So I kind of spoke to this. But a lot of high performing teams have over the last couple years or decades, depending on the size and maturity of the business, built their own tools and resources in house. And Paces in some instances can be a full replacement for whatever their internal tools are. In some instances it can be a really strong complement. So in those areas where it's a compliment, we're working on enterprise level integration so that folks can receive our data and our development support in a more streamlined fashion. Those are two things that come to mind.
- [21:47]
B
And I can imagine that you're exposed to the scouting activity of many of the developers using your platform. Are there any hot regions right now in the US where you're seeing a lot of density of developers trying to find good land and siting opportunities?
- [22:03]
C
Yeah, I'll start on the generation side. So I was on a call last week with somebody developing in the Southeast and they had an interesting anecdote which was, all of the load for my projects is in the north part of my state. All the best generation sites are in the south part of the state. How do I use Paces to inch and creep my way to bridge those two so that I can bring my generation projects closer to my load? And so what that looks like is tolerances being loosened. So if a couple of years ago a developer said, I need a perfectly rectangular 200 acre site for my solar project, right, or 500 acres or 5,000 acres, whatever it is, now a developer might say, okay, I'm okay with 185 acres, or I'm okay with a few less acres, or I'm okay with an odd shape, or I'm okay with some slope impacts to my site. I can engineer my way around that. Yes, to get closer to a higher value location or closer to a load or closer to an offtake or whatever it is. So that's on the generation side is developers being more creative to site their projects more strategically by loosening their development criteria and at the same time doing so in parallel with their banks, in parallel with their insurance agencies to not take on any additional risk. So creative siting is, I guess, is how I would summarize that. On the load side, I try to follow the data center news and it's hard to keep up. But there have been a couple new markets that have popped up in the last week or two. Alabama and Mississippi are two. Those are both southern company territories. So Mississippi Power and Alabama Power both had big announcements last week or the week before around new large data center projects. Indiana is really hot for data center new data center projects. And then the northern Great Plains, I would say North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, those are not necessarily new, totally net new markets, but they're certainly not tier A like Virginia. And it's been really interesting to see all the major announcements into those, you know, non coastal, non highly populated areas where there is a lot of power, a lot of land and a lot of other, the a lot of other infrastructure.
- [24:32]
B
We have talked a lot about power generation. You were mentioning in loud load. Why is paces the software so well fitted to also support the load side and for the audience to understand it, power generation, when a power plant wants interconnect to the grids and then generate, why is it very useful as well? For the load side, the requirements between
- [24:53]
C
a generation developer and a load developer are really similar. It is identification of viable land. It is identification of an area that is, that will be in support of the infrastructure that is going to be built out, permitting, zoning, land use. It is evaluation of the interconnection potential and even in a more simple way, evaluation of the power potential. Right. If it's a solar project, it's going to be injection. If it's a data center project, it's going to be withdrawal. A battery is going to do both and then it is an evaluation of the community sentiment and the allowance of that in that particular area. You see, and the reason why I mentioned that is because you've seen a lot of data centers over the last two to three weeks be canceled because of really strong community opposition. And so that's why I mentioned that. So the requirements are heavily shared between the two types of development. The differences are in the technicalities of a utility scale solar project has a much higher acreage requirement than a utility scale solar storage project, which has a different acreage requirement than a geothermal project, which has a slightly different requirement than a data center project, which has a different acreage requirement than a data center plus behind the meter, solar plus storage. So there are nuances in what type of infrastructure is being developed and what the physical footprint requirements are, but it's just. I need X amount of acres. Great. Okay, let's go find the X amount of acres then. The criteria for proximity to infrastructure, it's still a filter, it's just slightly different. For solar, you may need to be on a 230 or a 345 kilovolt transmission line. For a data center, that may be the same, except you're looking to draw power instead of push it. For a data center project, you, you also need to consider fiber and gas. For a solar project, not so much. But it's just additional data layers that you can find the intersection of on a map. And then for permitting zoning and land use, it's a different type of project. You know, some areas are really pro solar, some areas are really anti solar. Some areas, as we've seen in the news, are really pro data center, some are really anti data center. And so the verticals of like evaluation are the same. It's just what, what are you tweaking within, what people care about within each of them. So in a nutshell, very shared evaluation criteria between generation development and load development. And I think that's why Pace's customers portfolio is so representative of both of those segments.
- [27:39]
B
Okay, I see you flagged another risk that is very tied to landowners opposing to development, which is landowners getting together and backlash to the projects. Is there any way that you assess that additional risk in your process? And what output do you give to your clients?
- [27:56]
C
Yeah, we have a community sentiment and community overview module in Paces. So in addition to, I should say in parallel to the permitting, zoning and land use intelligence that we have, we pull the community sentiment for areas, you know, your area of interest for a project. If you're developing a project to understand how leaders and decision makers have voiced their opposition or support for infrastructure, how they have voted, and this shows up in our later stage diligence materials for development projects where we surface that. Because unless you're in the ground on the community, at that table, in the, in the room when they're when the decision makers are talking about it, you may not be privy to that information. It's all public. But with pace's software team and the tools that we have at our disposal, we're able to gather that and make it really easily accessible in Paces. So community sentiment is some is a data set, I should say a set of data sets that we gather and make available in Paces. So we don't have predictive analytics on top of that per se, but we capture what has been made public and made known and then there's some trend analysis that you can do on top of that.
- [29:11]
B
And it must be very difficult to find the signal of that community sentiment. Basically what you do is to understand it in simple terms is looking at the meetings records and making them available to developers. Or do you add a layer of analysis with LLM models to come up with a conclusion of what the risk in that area is? Or do you have human analysis behind how does it exactly work?
- [29:37]
C
Yeah. So on the permitting side of things, which we talked about a couple a little while ago, that is gathered, cleaned and then analyzed in PACES to again indicate to a developer whether a project is highly likely, moderately likely, unlikely to be approved for whatever development type it is. So Paces for permitting has analytics built on top of that for community sentiment it is more gathering those signals, gathering the text, gathering the social media, gathering anything that is in the public realm, cleaning it and making it available in paces. And we are for now leaving it up to the developer to evaluate that and understand how that risk maps to their strategy. And part of the reason why we've done this is because every developer has a different risk appetite, every developer has a different model, every developer has different investors, every developer has different legal counsel. And so every developer is going to view not every developer is going to view differently, but it's, it's likely that developers will have different opinions and takes on different on on the same community center. Unless it is as binary is, we will never support ever, you know, data centers or solar go away.
- [30:57]
B
Yes.
- [30:58]
C
And so Paces supports the gather those gathers those signals Official meeting minutes, announcements, social media from a variety of different sources. Anything that's in the public realm cleans it makes it very easily accessible to the developers who use PACES so they can as quickly as possible get a snapshot of the community sentiment for that area.
- [31:22]
B
Thank you for sharing that. We touched upon generation sites, touch upon load site, both linked to the grid and now there's a lot of people looking for off grid solutions with on site generation. How do they use your if. Well a. Do you have clients with that use case and how do they use a platform in that sense? Same logic. Was there anything different?
- [31:45]
C
Very same logic, I should say. Very similar logic. And we do have customers who are using that for this. One thing that really kickstarted our work in this off grid opportunity set was a white paper that we wrote with scale, microgrids and Stripe back in November of last year. It was an evaluation of in the wave of AI and load growth and in the world of increasingly long interconnection queues and increasingly complex connections processes, what if we just took it off grid, what would the cost profile, what would the cost of electricity, what would the complexity, what would the acreage requirements be for 100 megawatt off grid AI data center? So we modeled that out with scale and stripe. We wrote this really cool white paper on it and that was our kind of announcement into the off grid space. But Paces has always been a profound supporter of renewables deployment. For whatever the use case is, whether it's AI, dentists, AI data centers, competitive generation utility deployments, we believe it is the fastest and cheapest and is also the cleanest. That's a triple net win for everyone. And so when you think about as we're sitting here at this event, you know, thinking about everything we're hearing from the panels, data center developers, utility leaders, investors, the sentiment is this is complex. Lead times are too long. You can't get turbines if you're pursuing a thermal route, a thermal generation route, transformers are really backlogged. There's all this complexity surrounding the traditional interconnection connections process for a large load. If you look at the off grid model, you're able to find a lot of relief in a lot of those areas. You don't need to go through the same super intense studies with the utility. You don't need to have the same access to capital for large deposits. You don't need to have some of the same risk and redundancy requirements. So there are three advantages that Paces sees for the off grid playbook. Cost, complexity and time saying a little bit more on each of those cost. In that white paper with Stripe and Scale, we evaluated the cost of a highly redundant behind the meter energy mix, solar plus storage. As long as you don't go to 100% backup like 2x your power needs, the cost is really advantageous to some of the other deployment options that are available.
- [34:30]
B
So you reduce cost instead of connecting to the grid by going for on site generation. The result of the white paper set that you will reduce cost.
- [34:38]
C
Yes, you can, yeah, depending on a couple of other variables. But yes, it can be a low cost, very competitive cost option. And it's certainly more, you know, we looked at it at a levelized cost of electricity. So LCOE was our, our metric. And in that white paper we evaluated the known cost of refiring. I think it was Three Mile island, which was a constellation project.
- [35:02]
B
Yes.
- [35:02]
C
We looked at the cost of 100% thermal generation on site, 100% behind the meter. And the heavily renewable solar plus storage behind the meter, sized to a strong redundancy level, came in as, as one of the lowest cost options. So there's certainly cost advantages to doing an off grid deployment. Second is complexity. You know, everybody here at the conference is talking about backlogs and congested queues and how long it takes to study things and how folks aren't going to interconnect for 3, 5, 7, 10 years depending on the size of the application. You remove that complexity with a behind the meter off grid deployment. And then third is going to be your time. The cost advantages and the complexity, or lack thereof advantages contribute really strongly into the time advantages. So we have known, you know, Lazard has written about it and many other folks have written about how renewables, specifically solar and storage, can be the fastest to market, fastest to power and one of the lowest cost generation deployments. That's what we saw in that white paper and that's what solar, some of our customers are seeing. When it comes to deploying off grid, off grid networks, we have focused mostly
- [36:22]
B
on the cost side for developers. Do you do any assessment of revenue opportunity of the sites as well for the projects that are supposedly being developed in those nodes? And do you look at energy arbitrage, opportunity price shapes in that node or is that out of the scope of paces?
- [36:40]
C
We leave it up to the experts at MODO to do that, but we do have some foundational market signals. So what I mean by that is we have built out an LMP suite in paces. And so that allows specifically storage developers to have that additional layer of siting intelligence of development intelligence for where they're thinking about putting projects and how to size them. So there's, you know, development is, it's an art and a science. Right. And so trying to find the best land with the best price signals, with the access to the substation or the, or the electric line that has capacity in the year that you need it, which is also in a community that supports the type of development that you want to do. It's all happening at the same time. And so the more data that PACES can make available to developers in a streamlined fashion, the faster our developers can move and the more successful they'll be.
- [37:40]
B
Okay, makes sense. Thank you for sharing that. Well, actually here at Motor Energy, we are working on becoming Bankable. We have seen some traction, a lot of developers and actual projects coming out using our market intelligence. I know you're going through a similar process. Can you tell us a bit more about it?
- [37:56]
C
We're arm in arm when it comes to working to get projects bankable and approved by the capital markets and accepted by the industry overall. So I think what speaks to Pace's quality of data and our quality of our tools is our track record with projects. So we have released a couple case studies highlighting different developer customers who have had a massively positive interruption to their business by using paces. So they have, you know that as we talked about at the very start, that old sequential model of A, then to B, then to C, then to D, they have compared their project velocity, their project counts, their project efficiency, their capital efficiency in that old model and then with paces. And we've reflected that in some of the case studies that we have published online. And it ranges from more land focused developers to some of the largest ipps in the country. And our track record with finding viable sites, helping those developers navigate through permitting, interconnection and environmental due diligence, ultimately, to have a successful project enter the queue, clear the queue, progress into construction and then into operations is really strong. And so I think that track record speaks to our ability to, to have a huge amount of trust in PACES and in our data. From some of the largest ipps in the country, from some of the largest hyperscale developers in the country, from some of the largest real estate developers in the country, from some of the largest utilities in the country. So there's a huge amount of proof points from these different customer segments and from known actors and leading actors in those customer segments in terms of how they trust and leverage pace's data.
- [39:43]
B
Okay, great. Thank you for sharing that as well. Now we're jumping to the final part. I want to ask whether there's anything you want to plug or promote now to our audience. This is the moment.
- [39:53]
C
Yeah, I think we're doing a couple really exciting things. First, would be expanding our modular reporting and modular development intelligence capabilities as part of continuing to expand and improve our service offering. Service and capabilities offering. Second, would be working on enterprise integration. So some of our large ipps and large hyperscale developers are asking us to help plug in even more deeply and even more efficiently into their existing workflows, so helping them move faster and have an even more consolidated work stream for project development. Third would be continuing to put out great thought leadership pieces. We put out an awesome ERCOT piece a week or two ago evaluating where transmission was being planned and being built and then where data centers were being planned and being built and comparing and contrasting those in addition to adding in some layers around where Paces found the highest viability land and then triangulating those and saying hey, our data center is being built where transmission is being is built, also where the the highest and best use land is. I'm not going to I'm not going to give the spoiler alert, but it's a really good read. And then lastly would be I'm really excited about how our team continues to grow. So we continue to expand most of our teams at paces and are looking for bright, curious, driven, hungry people to come join our amazing team. And if anyone out there is interested in partnering with us, working with us in any capacity, feel free to reach out LinkedIn email, we'll put it in the show Notes. Would love to talk.
- [41:24]
B
Well now you know, you should reach out if you're interested. And the final question that we ask to all of our guests, we what is your contrarian view about the energy industry that other people might not share with you?
- [41:35]
C
I think we kind of spoiled it a little bit earlier, but I think I have two that go together. First is that the off grid solution is going to be a larger part of the energy mix than people realize. So there was an interesting quote from Chamath a week or two ago on an all in podcast episode where he said one of the most powerful utilities is a distributed network of homeowners. And so the continuing decentralization of our grid, not leaving the utility behind in collaboration with the utility to expand the network in a really efficient way I think is an awesome opportunity. And I think off grids, you know, groups like Soluna are doing amazing things deploying high volumes of megawatts in an off grid type setting. And so I think because of the complexity that we spoke to earlier in the episode, all of the queue backups on load and gen, and all of the procedural challenges that everybody at the conference today is talking about, unless there is massive positive disruption to those backlogs and a clearing of allowing projects to get into development and into construction and into operations because of the importance of getting AI data centers and manufacturing and additional deployments up and running. The opportunity cost is so high of those projects sitting on the sidelines that the off grid model makes a ton of sense. And I think it's going to be increasingly used as a playbook. The second piece is that permitting,
- [43:20]
B
it
- [43:20]
C
isn't actually all that scary. It doesn't have to be a black box with some of the tools that Paces has built to understand, okay, what type of project has been Approved the last 12 months in this particular region, what type of project has been denied the last 12 or 18 months. And understanding the permitting characteristics that are likely to allow a project to go through is a really powerful thing that we continue to do. So permitting isn't a black box where, you know, you throw a project and you close the lid and you hope to hear from the agency a couple months later. Right. Like it can be predicted, it can be broken down with some of the AI tools that we're using. So off grid, I think, is going to be a bigger part of the energy mix. And I think permitting is going to continue to be simplified and more well understood, and therefore it's going to allow more projects to be permitted successfully and more clean and low carbon megawatts put onto the system.
- [44:18]
B
That's a very good ending. Thank you, Stuart, for joining us today. It was a pleasure to have you here at Transmission by Motor Energy.
- [44:24]
C
Thanks for having me. This was great.