The Energy Insider - Episode #13 - Jack Doueck and Gabe Phillips - The Energy Insider - Hosted by Jack Doueck of the Energy Marketing Conference

Jack Doueck Welcomes Gabe Phillips to The Energy Insider Welcome everyone to another episode of the Energy Insider Podcast. This is brought to you by EMC. The Energy Marketing Conference is the largest competitive energy conference in the country. We've been running, as everybody knows, 12. We did 12 years of conferences so far, the spring in Houston and the fall New York City. And we moved recently moved the New York City conference in the fall to Washington, DC. So now we've done 24 conferences and we're up to our 25th coming up next, next spring, next spring, which is April the 14th and 15th in Houston, TX. EMC, if you don't know is a 2 day event with loads of content, about 70 speakers and really the best networking opportunity of the year. We also run a a monthly newsletter, if you don't know about that, it's free and webinars. We also run the WEA, which is the Women's Energy Alliance, which has its own mentorship program for women webinars and, and live in person networking meetings in different cities around the country. And all that is really encompassed in what EMC is trying to do in the industry. And so with that, I, I want to, I want to thank my, my guest today, my guest of honor today, and a good friend of mine, Gabe Phillips. Gabe. Gabe is the founder and CEO of Catalyst Power. Gabe, thank you so much for joining us on this call. Speaker 2 Jack, thanks so much for having me. And we do go way back. I believe that I've been in attendance at a minimum 22 of 24 of those conferences. Speaker 1 That's amazing. That's amazing. But maybe just start with a little bit of your background in the industry. You know, what, what, what, what you know, you've been in this space so long, you've been a speaker and a sponsor of our conferences and moderator and for many, many years. And, and really it's been a, a tremendous honor for EMC to have you share your wisdom all the time with us and our conferences. Everybody appreciates it because you really are one of the best and biggest minds in retail energy today in the country. And I don't think that's AI, don't think that's an arguable, you know, fact. That's a fact of life. And so really thank you again for taking time today. I know you're very busy doing a million things, but give us a little background on yourself. From Trader to Catalyst Power: Serving Independent Businesses Thank you for pumping up my ego. I appreciate starting with that. So I'm a recovering electricity trader. It's the best way to describe me. I started my career trading power at Sempra Energy Trading. Physically, we were in Connecticut, but I've traded every power market in North America from Canada to Mexico at one time or another. And at, you know, Sempra we were, you know, a physical and financial trading merchant, so a proprietary trading shop. And that gave me an intimate look at the physical power markets all throughout the country. And, and you know, we provided liquidity to natural participants as, as a trade shop. And so I got a, a good look at what the business needs were associated with all these new natural participants that were popping up in the early 2000s into, you know, into the 20 tens in the industry with natural exposure in power and in gas and in renewables. And so actually I, I left proprietary trading in 2010 and started my first business as a, as an entrepreneur called GP Energy management, where we helped those natural participants use the market to meet their various business needs. So upstream market participants who made commodity, we would help developers of power plants, both renewable and thermal to you know, market the commodity, put hedging strategies in place and, and then ultimately get contracts that they enable them to finance their facilities. And then when they were up and running, we would do bidding and scheduling and optimization for them. We managed around 2000 megawatts of generation there. And on the downstream side of the market that was mostly services for retail energy providers, which gave me my first really real intimate look into the retail space, the good, the bad and and the ugly. And I was able to, you know, develop a a fairly broad scoop of work that at times bordered from amateur psychology all the way down to bidding and scheduling and load forecasting and the nuts and bolts of the physical commodity business associated with retail. So there we had the pleasure of managing, you know, up to 50 different retail energy books at different times, 4000 megawatts of load, a couple 100 BCF a year of, of, of gas demand all throughout the deregulated footprint in the country. And I, I noticed while doing that work on both the upstream and the downstream sides of the market, a couple of gaps that were generally fixated around the independent business owner customer segment. And so I thought a lot about those gaps and how I might address them as this service provider, but I couldn't find the right angle. I sold the business in 2016 to a company called Genscape, which I'd been a customer of since the first day's trading, and they monitored power plants all around the country. I thought it was really cool. They came a knockin and, you know, looking to get closer to the transactions that their customers were using their data to enter into. I hadn't earned out for a couple of years and ultimately wound that up in 2019. And I finally, you know, figured out how to get back to the principal side of the market and focus on that customer gap, you know, that I'd seen as an energy manager, you know, an independent business owner generally has more options at their home for renewables and financing of assets at their home than they do with their business. And the same thing with, you know, product design on retail. There's more sophistication brought to the mass market consumer generally than there has been for the independent business owner, unlike the large end user with sophistication who's got all the options at their fingertips from every supplier that that is able to offer those. So I wanted to to democratize access to both of those things to the independent business owner, the engine of our economy and you know really the the most underserved customer segment throughout the energy complex and bring those different walks of the energy life that I've had in my past to bear it one place. And so that's how we conceived of what Catalyst Power, you know should be and is. We are an energy supplier, but we, you know, use the market to supply our customers to an extent. But we also use assets that we develop and build and then ultimately own and operate at our customers premises to, to also supply them with cleaner energy options that have all these other features associated with them that they couldn't access on their own. Exploring Solar, Micro CHP, and the Battery Storage Dilemma So, so, so if that's a great thank you for that. That's a great background on you personally and on Catalyst. So when you talk about assets that you put and you they build and you manage and you operate at the at the sites of your customers, what are you talking about? What kind of assets? But I don't want to. I don't want to guess, but tell me what you what they are. Speaker 2 So you know, we, we conceived of that asset platform as being technology agnostic, right. So I don't care what the widget is as long as it's something that I can underwrite and it's financeable, you know, if it makes cleaner power, you know, with the, you know, good vibes, I'll, I'll underwrite it. I don't care. But you know what, what that what is that has taken the form of thus far in the last several years has been standalone solar rooftop and ground mount behind the fence and in front of the meter. So we'll monetize the asset would in that market with the whatever the most advantageous mechanism is. And then most recently we've added combined heat and power, which is a combination of power generation and waste heat capture for both heat production and in some instances absorption cooling. And then the ancillary equipment associated with that, boilers, chillers, cooling towers, etcetera. We've looked at storage, we've tried our damnedest to make it work both behind the meter and stand alone. We have a couple of projects I would say are still hanging around the hoop under development, but that market has been elusive. You know, it's been difficult to pin down costs at the customer segment size that we want to focus on. It was easier to scale down solar and it was easier to get our heads wrapped around micro CHP. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't do larger projects so that we don't want to do larger projects. But like I said before, the customer segment we focus on is the independent business owner. And so they're best categorized by what they're not. And you know, they are not a sophisticated public company with the 12 person energy procurement team is looking at all these different options. But that means it's a really wide range of consumption profiles and sizes. And you know, it's pizzerias and laundromats and it's extremely large industrial, you know, manufacturers and even data centers. We have a couple of customers right now that we serve their load from the market and that we're building combining power assets for that are in the data center space. So it's a really wide range of what they do and how large their consumption profiles are. And so getting down market on the asset sizes, we had to pick equipment that you could, you know, both get really small with and scale up with. And so, so far, standalone solar and Kibai heat and power have been the flavours to join. Speaker 1 So let me just back up for a second about what you said about battery, battery storage as as it you're talking about it really as an independent generating facility, but what about just combining it with the with the solar? Did you know, isn't it, isn't it more productive for solar to have battery, battery connected to it? So when it's not sunny out that you know you can switch and vice versa. Speaker 2 I mean, fundamentally that that that sounds right. You know, moving production from hours where it's less useful or less valuable from a market perspective to hours where it's more valuable, right. You know, fundamentally makes a ton of sense. The problem is the cost of doing so. The battery itself and its installation makes that that layered additional investment have a negative impact on the IRR panel and solar. If by itself the battery made sense, then by itself then then combining it with solar would also make sense. Problem is by itself it in the markets where we work at, at the sizes that we look at and where most of our customer activity is, it hasn't made sense. What is that? Speaker 1 What is that sweet spot? What is that sweet spot size? Speaker 2 For storage, yeah. I don't know yet. Let me know when you no. Speaker 1 What, What? What, what? What? What were you saying? The size you're looking at? What are you looking at? Speaker 2 So I would say our average solar installation to date has been about, you know, call it like 400, four, 150 kilowatts DE of of of solar. We have some installations that are two megawatts and we have some that are 200 kilowatts. And you know honestly with with the volatility and the federal incentives, we're not adding to that portfolio at the moment. There are still opportunities for us to do so with shorter turn around times. We're behind the meter solar right now, but we're not actively pursuing any of the in front of meter opportunities which require lengthy and you know unpredictable interconnection timelines. So like Connecticut, that market only works in front of the meter smart in Massachusetts, mostly the same thing in New York, it's a mixed bag. We can do a lot of behind the meter solar in New York, but you know, you need the right customer profile and you know, the right to do local the, the permitting processes and stuff like that to make that work. Speaker 1 Well, let's talk about CHP, right? How Combined Heat and Power Boosts Thermal Efficiency Combined heat and power. It's been around a long time. I mean, I remember talking about CHP 10-15 years ago. What, what has something changed in that, in that world? And and and where does it apply and how much space do you need to do it? Speaker 2 I had owned ACHP plant that was quite large, you know, that was built back in the in the 90s, frankly. So this has been around, you know, for forever and ever. This is nothing terribly new. And, and the technology itself is also not not novel. I mean, we're talking about, you know, reciprocating engine blocks like you got in a truck, you know, and they're attached to a generator and, you know, they operate on natural gas as their feedstock. And the waste, the waste heat capture for domestic hot water is pretty simple. It's just a manifold and it goes into a hot water storage. Speaker 1 You said, you said that. You said that pretty quickly. Let's let's can we, can we say that again slower for people that don't know what CHP is? Speaker 2 You burn fuel to make electricity in generation. Gas. Large power. Speaker 1 Gas diesel, Is it diesel? Is it gas? What is it? Speaker 2 We're leveraging the natural gas, you know, interconnection system, you know, the delivery system, and these are natural gas generators that we work on. There are plenty of other combined heat and power applications that might use different fuels, but generally speaking, natural gases of fuel is the easiest and most ubiquitous to access. You can make this heat by burning that gas in a turbine or in a reciprocating engine. Doesn't matter what the, the mode of you know of turning a, you know of turning a generator is, but when you combust a fuel, you produce heat. Large power plants like the ones that are interconnected to the ISO, you know, 700 megawatts, you know, 1000 MW power plants often times capture that waste heat in a heat recovery steam generator or a Herzig. Those are called combined cycle power plants. You also may have excess heat that you don't capture there that could be used for some other industrial process like the larger combined heating power plant that I owned in the past. It was 80 megawatts and it used turbines and we made heat both for the Herzig to make extra power with in a combined cycle configuration, but also captured the waste heat for our steam host and we made steam for a food processing facility. So scale that way down from 80 megawatts to 80 kilowatts. We're talking about, you know, a small reciprocating engine in the boiler room, typically if there's space or just outside of a building, even in New York City in, in Queens, where we own assets in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey. It works in all these markets where we either have a consistent domestic hot water need, let's call it from laundry, or, you know, winter shaving from the boiler. So, you know, use the boiler less in the winter and use the heat production to supplement space heating. That's one way of using the, the waste heat captured from power production. And then in the summertime, you can also capture that that heat. Or in some applications, like we have a couple of aquatic centers that we serve with this, with this, this this type of asset that they need cooling year round for dehumidification purposes. And you can capture that heat and bring it into an absorber, which runs a reverse refrigeration cycle. It's an absorption chiller. They use that heat as your prime mover to create chilled water. And so either way you shake it, the same generator could be used for both heat capture applications for one only or for the other only. And that makes it very thermally efficient by themselves. The two different modes of energy production, whether it's electricity or thermal in its different forms, are like 4555% thermally efficient. That's pretty typical. Wholesale power plants down to distributed power plants are within that range for electricity production alone. But when we combine that with the waste heat capture, we can get up to 70 or 80% thermal efficiency. That's really decarbonizing as compared with the alternative. So I still believe that I'm decarbonizing my customers by leveraging this equipment, even though it's natural gas fired clearly like the, you know, the the pie in the sky solution for combining a on site power generator with decarbonization, which most of my customers don't care about, but we do. They care about economics. They're coin operated. We've got to deliver savings and value and long term price certainty and things that meet their budgetary constraints and needs. But I care about doing that in a cleaner way. Come, I'd eaten Bauer, checked all those boxes. Now why did it take me this long to adopt it? Well, there's a bunch of different reasons for that, at least here at Catalyst Power, Namely because it's a it's a much more highly engineered solution than stand alone solar is. I mean, I can desktop engineer a solar installation or my teammates can, at least I would, but I can't do what my teammates can. They can do it in a matter of minutes using a Google image and some measurements to get to 95% close to where we're going to get with final engineering drawings for sizing, shading, etcetera. That's pretty easy and pretty quickly to crank out. And the costs are fairly, you know, they're, they're fairly similar from the cost per Watt at a 200 kW as they are at a, you know, MW size. Maybe you get a little bit of economy of scale, but not massive differences. The CAP, the, you know, the labor part of this, the installation of the runs for the electricity from the generator to the electrical panel that they capture, the natural gas piping, the plumbing, all of those. Speaker 1 Things. Hot water, hot water. Speaker 2 Yeah, hot water plumbing have significant impact on the ultimate cost per kilowatt of what you can deliver. And you get a size assets, you know, now considering two different constraints, electricity consumption and heat and thermal consumption. So we've we've doubled what we need to know in order to size an asset accordingly. And it's stuff that we don't have access to by looking at Google Earth. I got to get real data from a customer to figure out what their thermal consumption needs are. And so that that's a higher bar for desktop engineering. And you know, usually if site visits got to come into play too, because the constraints in the boiler room for what type of equipment we can use, like different OEMs have different size constraints and therefore also have different heat production opportunities really impact what you could put somewhere. So it's a, it's a more highly engineered solution. And so I, I, I shield away from it until we found a partner who delivered us engineered solutions that we could tweak and optimize in partnership with this, you know, with, with a partner who has expertise there to self perform installation and maintenance, to do the engineering, both desktop and site and then even stamp drawings and then take those projects through to fruition, fund them, own them and optimize them. That's what we finally found at the end of 2023. And our current partner OHA Power, you may have seen some press on our partnership with them. They owned assets, they provided services to lots of other commercial industrial customers throughout the Northeast. And that can that that combination of our efforts has yielded a ton of fruit for us both. We've continued to build upon that partnership with other opportunities that have come into our, you know, into our fold from the what is a pretty small world. It's a really niche area within the energy complex. And his book is like, I've now sort of occupied different walks of the energy complex life here in my career, you know, wholesale trading, retail, the scale, asset operations and ownership and optimization. Now in the distributed space that was like, it was even more myopic view where it's distributed renewables. Now I'm in this world of distributed micro CHP. It's like there's like 8 people who understand what I'm talking about in that particular genre in that little like biopic area and, and who have any experience with it. And so we had some inorganic opportunities to bring in a portfolio, both of O&M and my partner's side of the business and of asset ownership on our side. And now we've got a really nice platform to build upon, and that's what we're doing today. Delivering Savings and Reliability with On-Site CHP Systems So fantastic. And I have a lot of questions about this. I try to keep it quick because we want to do this in 30 minutes for everybody. So just first of all the this just what you just described, the CHP, the let's call it micro CHP systems that can go into buildings, boiling rooms, etcetera. At the end of the day, with you, you, your company is basically the owner of that machine and you're, are you selling the power to the building? Are you buying the natural gas? You know, how does it work economically? And, and will the, and do, I'm assuming the answer is yes. You know, do the do the do the do the end consumers at the end of the day spend less money on their on their energy needs because of this. Speaker 2 We are able to deliver much more economic value per dollar invested with a combined heat and power plant than we are with a standalone solar asset. The energy density difference is is significant, right. It's an around the clock producer of energy, whether it's power or thermal energy. Solar has got a pretty limited capacity factor. And so that alone allows us to deliver significant savings to our customers by undercutting both their power costs when we sell them the electricity produced on site right behind the meter. Same, you know, concept is avoiding, you know, grid supply and distribution transmission with solar except around the clock now instead of just during those couple hours of the day that solar's peaking. And then on the thermal front, you know, yes, we got to pay for gas. We may be offsetting an electric use. Before that was like for a chiller, but now we're paying for gas instead. But we're taking advantage of that spark spread, or at least the customer's taking advantage of that spark spread, which could allow us to undercut the power cost for the chiller as well if it was electric driven, for instance. There's different things that you offset, but either way the gas to power conversion is much more efficient. Than it is when you're buying the, the, the gas just to burn in a boiler or the power from a different distant gas fire generator that had, you know, a lesser, A lesser efficiency than what we're doing on site. So the dollar savings to the customer is significant. And yes, we sell the production right there on site to our host. Our typical contract structure today is the, the host brings the gas, we give them back the output. So it's called a tolling arrangement. They give us the feedstock and we give them back the output. And so they're taking some exposure on the value of that output relative to the cost of the gas that they deliver us. But the spread is so significant that the risk that they're taking is minimal and the value of the output is heavily correlated to the cost of the gas that they're typically buying. And because we offer retail gas everywhere that we offer combined heat and power solutions, if they want to hedge that price risk with us or they want to just stick with the utility, that option's at their fingertips and we can give them whatever contract structure they believe is risk additive or risk, sorry, risk reducing in this, in this structure for them. We do have other customers who said we just, we, we're not like we're not interested in that. Just give us like 1 number. And so you take all that, you know, establish your own gas meter and you pay for it. We got that going too, you know, but we can accept a lower rate of return if we don't have the yet the fuel price risk which delivers deeper savings to the customer. Speaker 1 It is it. Would you say it's more reliable than than just being straight on the grid with for 100% of your electric needs? Speaker 2 Meaning like actual outages. Speaker 1 Yeah. Like is it, is it, is it more reliable? Like I, I've, I've heard in, I don't know, it's got to be 1015 years ago that hospitals were putting in CHP because there was a D e.g., you know, it was a distributed end generation, meaning they did it for reliability reasons, so they wouldn't have blackouts or brownouts. Is that is that's the case still, or is that not really the reality? Speaker 2 You might be conflating to two things that that that healthcare facilities generally do do. I mean, they often have a very consistent thermal need. And so they're a wonderful host for combined heat and power and lots and lots of hospitals have done so, but not for reliability purposes, for reliability because they have, you know, actual life saving at their core. They they can't risk even an outage in the natural gas distribution system, right, Right. So their backup generation has to incorporate on site fuel storage, which usually means a diesel backup standby generator, not the same as the as the combined heat and power resource. Speaker 1 Right. But there's, but there's that there's in my experience, there's a lot less, a lot more reliability with natural gas than there is with, with electricity of that. Is that wrong? Speaker 2 No, it's not wrong. But it's still, you know, again, we're talking about life and death, no? Speaker 1 No, I know. I know. No hospitals. Yeah, I hear what you're saying. OK. Speaker 2 Now, you know, we are able to offer to a customer the ability to operate in standby mode or islanded mode. That is something that we can offer. It's an additional expense for us to be able to put the equipment in necessary to do so. And so that requires a standby payment like a capacity payment, right, right. An insurance, it's an insurance policy. And what I have found thus far is that, you know, even in, in the Northeast where we've had Sandy, where we've had winter storms knock off, you know, grid supply, where we've had, you know, the, the, the blackout of the whole Northeastern interconnect was at O 4. You know, people do not highly value paying a standby charge for a backup generator, you know, or, and if they're going to have one, they might, they more often just pay for it themselves. So we haven't, we don't have a ton of backup generation in the portfolio. We have some, we have some, but it's usually a separate piece of equipment that we put on site that can, you know, ramp up with an automatic transfer switch. Speaker 1 And, and let's just just talk about the market in general. There's been obviously tremendous increases in the cost of capacity markets, especially PJM and you know, in different, different Isos, different RT OS. Analyzing Capacity Markets, Data Centers, and Future Energy Trends Where do you see the markets right now? What, what do you, do you think the, the supply demand imbalance is going to continue like this, get better, get worse? Where, where? Where are you? Where? Where's your head? Speaker 2 You know, the, the customer doesn't see the different markets and its granularity that, that we live and die by, right, that we live with every day. They, they see one number that they get charged when they turn on their light switch. And so you know the, the, the dynamics of the capacity market versus the energy markets. You can't ignore that fact when we're going to discuss the volatility at the customer's meter, right. The volatility has really, really shown up most recently in the capacity markets, which really a lot more due to outages and you know, unit retirements, excuse me then it does, you know, significant amounts of demand growth. So the, the supply and demand imbalance really only exists today in that in that market, not in the energy markets. The energy markets themselves, they're backwardated in some cases. And if they're not the, you know, the heat rates that we're seeing expanding over time wouldn't indicate a significant potential imbalance between, you know, resources and, and, and needs. You're not seeing some crazy jump up in the, you know, in the spark spread associated with, you know, with a, with a gas fired power plant. It's just sort of tracking gas at a pretty similar rate to what it has, you know, in the, in the front few years where there's more liquidity. So I've actually, you know, been involved in a lot of discussions with folks saying the data center demand from AI and from everything else is going to cause, you know, the power markets to go haywire. And I'm like, sorry, but the markets are telling us a different story. We don't see that when we look at the forward curves through 20/20/30, right. The wholesale power marks are telling us not to be too concerned about that. The only real data point we have about any supply and demand imbalance is 1 PGM capacity market clear for the current planning year and that's it. We have one day to point, it's a big one. It went up five fold. It was crazy, but it was just one. Speaker 1 That's a, that's a, that's a pretty optimistic view. I, I, I, I, I was at a conference recently where people were talking to these experts on natural gas. We're talking about there is a lot of natural gas supply, maybe more than we will ever need, but there's not enough storage capacity to hold it and that's why they're anticipating prices to go up in natural gas over the next couple of years. You don't see the same. You don't see it that way. Speaker 2 When there's a lot of gas production and there's not enough places to put it, it shows up in the market. And so that actually is a price depressive concept. Speaker 1 Not a It's the opposite you're saying. It's the opposite of what you say. Speaker 2 If you run out of space to yeah. And then you start shutting wells in, right? They're they're. Speaker 1 They're saying there's not enough space to put it, so they're gonna basically not produce it. Speaker 2 Right. So then you, so then you, when you see well counts go down, then you'll see prices move up. And that's been a dynamic that's existed in the 20 plus years I've been doing this. I've been watching the natural gas economy, you know, how, how much room do we have to put gas in the ground? How much is coming out of the ground? How quickly can we shut it in? How quickly can we ramp it back up? And there's no cure for high prices like high prices, Jack. So the second that we see gas price appreciation, you see these wells start to produce again and it comes back into the market. And there is insistently been that dynamic solution between, you know, 'cause cause gas can solve itself more, more quickly than power supply can. It'll take years to permit a new power plant. And today the market that we actually see a dislocation in is not power or gas. It's in the, the power generation equipment market. You can't buy a turbine that'll be delivered anytime before 20-30 right now. Yeah, it's, it's wild. So the large prime mover power plant equipment market, that's where we've seen the significant dislocation, not in the commodity markets themselves. Actionable Strategies for Businesses to Manage Energy Risk Got it. Let let me ask you one last question because they're kind of running out of time. What can businesses, independent businesses as your core customer, what could they do to what could they do to, you know, manage their energy bills or protect their businesses from spikes? What, what what do you think is in the best interest of of you know, Mr. Missus, small business America, not small, but mid mid size even. Speaker 2 Diversification is key, you know, so diversify the way that you're getting your supply. If you're getting it exclusively from the market, then you should probably figure out how to get some of that out of the market into an on site resource. If you have the capital and you have the sophistication to own it and operate it yourselves, that would be amazing. That's sort of like a like, you know, like a diamond in the rough that you don't normally find. And so an external party to own and operate that equipment on site like us is probably a a good solution for that. I shouldn't be talking my own book on a podcast, but obviously I'm partial to that solution set being one that I think folks should consider. But of course, you know, layering in different tenors, like, you know, a, a contract for a combining power off take agreement with us could be 15 years. A retail contract could be five years, could be 3 years, could be one year. You could layer it in different ways depending on the commodity that you're talking about. You could buy gas for a year, you could buy power for three. You could do the opposite. But diversification of tenor and and source is always wise for eliminating or managing risk. I mean, you also have to define what your business need is. Like if you have customers who accept prices from you that involve commodity price passers, like in the the gas businesses, you know, like the compressed gas world and stuff like that, then you have to consider a different contract structure. But if your customers, if you're, you know, contending with a market where customers prices are not elastic and you just got to like manage down your OpEx, then you've got to figure out a different way to do that. And undercutting your cost structure and your exposure to utility costs is, is absolutely key. And if you're not doing that, then your competitors will. Speaker 1 That's key. That's key. And then the competitor and the competitors in many cases, you know, real estate companies are trying to attract tenants and they're, you know, new tenants and some of those tenants are big users of power. Could be data centers or a, they use a lot of AI, whatever it is. And you know, they, they, they are feeling a lot of pressure. They are feeling a lot of pressure to, to, to manage the course of power. And it feels, feels from their perspective, feels out of that control. So what you're saying is get back some of that control and don't just be, you know, just be, don't just be a bystander and, and let and you know, buy, buy from the utility or even even from suppliers. But but you know get get more active and and and manage your risk like you would do in any other category. Speaker 2 Do something. If you sit around and do nothing because you are, you're a deer in headlights and can't decide what to do and you're afraid of making the wrong call. Scale down the decision. If your on site resource could produce 100% of your needs or you could scale it down to produce 25% of your needs and you're concerned that you're stepping out there and making a call that will end up being out of the money in the future, then just scale it down. You're still, you're still short the commodity price risk. You still have the option of doing something different in the future if something better rears its head. And I think that's there's some wisdom in that for folks if they're listening. Speaker 1 Good stuff, good stuff. Any parting words for our audience? So EMCEMC. This is mostly an EMC audience and you know the people. So you've been to 22 out of 24 I. Speaker 2 Think that's. Speaker 1 Why you missed those two? That's a. That's a big problem, but. Speaker 2 Dictory 1 and I, I and I didn't like going to Vegas. I'm sorry, you know, parting words. I mean, look, I, I think that you can't be a single solution provider in this industry. If you only do retail, I think you're gonna get left in. You're gonna get left behind. If you only offer solar, you're gonna get left behind 'cause you're exposed to what happens, like what just happened this past summer with OB three. If you only do CHP, you're gonna miss out on other opportunities. I think that you have to consider casting a wider net. If you're in, if you're in this, if you're in the energy business, understand that you're a student of the industry in its entirety, not just your myopic. Speaker 1 Corner That's great, great advice and as usual, great, great wisdom as as always and thank you for for sharing it with us. And it's a have have a have a fantastic holiday and A and a a really great happy New year. Speaker 2 Happy Hanukkah. OK.