https://player.captivate.fm/episode/9499d72c-f26e-4f2f-8e3f-7a9e31426b64/

CJ Jerard

00:00:00.160 - 00:00:08.160

You know, you always, at that point, I think you have to sit down and say, okay, what are our true north? What are our values? Right. Otherwise you get a Frankenstein.

Zena Harris

00:00:08.560 - 00:00:20.520

Hi, this is Zena Harris and I'm Mark Rabin. Welcome to the tie in Xena. Hey, Mark, how are you? Where are you, Winter?

Mark Rabin

00:00:20.520 - 00:00:31.920

I'm still. I'm still in winter. I don't know if anybody saw my. Saw my post yesterday, but I am in Canada. I'm in Alberta and it has been minus 30 degrees Celsius.

Zena Harris

00:00:31.920 - 00:00:34.200

I don't even know what that feels like. I don't think I've ever felt.

Mark Rabin

00:00:34.200 - 00:00:43.120

It's crazy. It's crazy. But, you know, like, literally, like tears streaming, like your hands freeze in two seconds, you know? Winter, real winter.

Zena Harris

00:00:43.600 - 00:01:00.740

Well, we saw some snow flurries. They didn't stick. So fun for a minute. Yeah. This week we're talking with Jonah Geshwin and Christopher Gerard. C.J. from Outside Days.

Mark Rabin

00:01:01.620 - 00:01:35.389

Yeah. Amazing. These guys are setting the gold standard, or I should say green standard for, yeah, truly greening festivals, but not just.

Not just lip service, but actually doing it. And they've laid out a roadmap and they talk about it to us. And even with presentation stats, like, we're really doing it.

And it's not just, you know, plastic water bottles. It's. It's everything from food, materials handling to power for like 30,000 people.

Zena Harris

00:01:35.710 - 00:02:05.360

Yeah, yeah. It's a big festival. It's May 29th to 31st this year. It's in Denver. And, you know, go check it out. Go see what they're doing in real time.

They invited us to go, so maybe we'll meet. Yeah, we'll see. But this is the roadmap. And so if you're planning an event or you're going to be Planning one in 2027, definitely worth a listen.

And really pay attention to, like, what they're tracking, how they're doing it. It's really cool stuff.

Mark Rabin

00:02:05.840 - 00:02:56.500

Yeah. Yeah. So enjoy and please remember to like and subscribe on our social media channels. And we'd love to hear from you. So please do feel, reach out and.

Yeah, en. Hey, everybody. Today we're here speaking with CJ and Jonah Geshwin.

Super excited to have you guys on to talk about the real world deployments that you guys have been up to. Jonah and I met at Global Citizen over a year ago now, and we have you on the podcast as well.

So you're a returning guest and you've been up to some amazing things and we look forward to hearing about Your work as well as with the Outside Days festival as well. So guys, who are we speaking to today?

Jonah Geschwind

00:02:56.900 - 00:03:43.850

I can kick it off at least my. At least as a returning guest. It's awesome to be back in and see Zena and Mark as well.

And at least Green Disco is an environmental consultancy and we really kind of support all types of festivals, concerts, venues, stadiums and really all types of live events with sustainability programs. Doing the data collection to really understand, quantify the impacts.

Really integrating the onsite solutions, whether it's with waste management, with the onsite energy, trying to mitigate and reduce reliance on diesel and then really focused on the impact reporting too.

So how do we actually really share this way that connects with fans and here with cjin, definitely want him to give the intro to Outside Festival, one of our amazing partners we've had the pleasure of working with over the past few years.

CJ Jerard

00:03:44.210 - 00:05:19.890

Thanks Jonah. Thanks for having me on. I'm Chris Gerard. Cj, as you guys have heard, I'm with Outside.

Outside is a collection now of the famous Outside magazine as most people know, but also another 30 brands that all come together from climbing and backpacking and Yoga Journal. Our apps with Gaia and Trail forks that really are all about inspiring people to get outside. That is our mission at Outside is to get outside.

Yeah, you know, very simple. But most things that work are simple and that's what we always come back to.

That's our true north in terms of what we're trying to accomplish in the world and Outside days as it is now, year one, Year two is Outside Festival is under my purview here at Outside as the Chief Brand Officer in addition to some other activations that we have. But this is really my baby, our baby with my team in experiential. We've been lucky enough to be introduced to Jonah and his team from the beginning.

And when we came up with this idea, there were all sorts of aspects around sustainability that we had goals with. And I'm happy to talk about the origin story. I'll kick it back to you. That's just who I am. But I'll let you guys direct it from there.

There's all sorts of fun stuff in terms of how you build a large scale event like this with sustainability in mind. And we've got Jonah and I have some great stories on how that came to be.

Zena Harris

00:05:20.210 - 00:05:39.010

Well, first of all, cj, great to meet you. Jonah, great to see you. But yeah, I mean do tell us, we want to know all the dirt on how this got started.

The origin story and like, yeah, the process for getting this thing going sustainably.

CJ Jerard

00:05:40.620 - 00:11:54.200

Yeah.

The origin story on the event itself, which has really been a remarkable journey of idea to execution for myself and others like Jonah, who had been involved from the early days.

Really, one of these things that started as an idea conversation, myself and our CEO Robin Thurston had a conversation now, five years ago over lunch. Hey, why doesn't the outdoors have sort of a South by Southwest kind of event?

You know, trade shows have always been prevalent in the outdoor industry, but a cultural event that brings that people really want to go to, whether or not it's in their business. Right. He spent a lot of time in Austin. I've been to south by many, many times.

And that idea of a cultural gathering for a summit, if you will, for the outdoor industry and a festival for the outdoor enthusiast really lit my synopsis up and started connecting.

And we had some conversations with the governor of Colorado and some conversations with the city of Denver and with the outdoor recreation office specifically, and our good friend and director over there, Connor hall around trying to bring something like this to Colorado. Colorado's got a great brand in that way also, right? Outdoor people.

And all of a sudden it was like, hey man, maybe we could make something happen here. And just some anecdotal sort of stuff.

Like I went to Austin with a map of Denver and went through south by and sort of looked at the geography and was like, hey, I think that we could do something there. You know, all these theaters and all these venues in a very concentrated space in Denver. And how could we bring like a large scale event here?

So that's where like the idea really, you know, from an entrepreneurial perspective, which is really my background, it was like, I think that, I think there's something here and I think there's a thirst for gathering within our industry. So maybe there's a signal.

We did a feasibility report that came back with some support from the state that got me a little bit of a mandate internally.

And at that point, and this is the relevant part, when it was apparent that we could do something large scale, you know, you always, at that point, I think you have to sit down and say, okay, what are our true north? What are our values? Right.

Otherwise you get a Frankenstein pretty fast as different pressures come in, a new sponsor comes in and they want this, that or the other thing. Business pressures, staff pressures, time pressures, you know, municipalities pressures, right?

So we sat down and said, okay, what are our values around this? And I, and I think this is a really important part of Building anything, right? Culture and the values, creativity.

You know, we knew we wanted music, we knew we wanted film and magnetism that would bring people to buy a ticket, right? So creativity sort of encompassed that. The second part was inclusivity, right? Part of what get everyone outside is by its nature inclusive, right?

We want as many people who are interested in the outdoors, not just the performance people, the mountain climbers and, and, you know, the hardcore runners and so on, but the folks who just want to eat a sandwich in the park and get sunlight in their eyes, right? Like, so make sure that we create an event that really invites everybody from all different walks of life to come in and be in the park together.

And the third very important and relevant to what we're talking about was sustainability.

And so we set that out as a value right away because as we know, anyone that's built any sort of business, you know, you really have to have that as a value. Or frankly, it's hard, right, to do things in a sustainable way. It's harder, it's easier and cheaper, often.

And faster, more expedited to not do them that way often.

And so if you haven't set that out from a leadership perspective and assigned some accountability, some directly responsible individuals, you know, it. It suddenly finds a way of not being there, right?

So that, from an origin perspective, I, you know, that's what I would want to call out to your audience is, you know, you have to make the commitment right from the beginning. And so it was right there in our big three pillars that what we do, everything we do, has to go push, get pushed through those three pillars.

Creativity, inclusivity, and sustainability. And so along that journey, we had someone that had to be assigned directly to that.

And that's how we came to Jonah as well, is, okay, well, we need to make sure that we've got an expert who knows how these events get put together, what to do, what not to do, and find a trusted partner and have internally responsible people who actually. Sometimes there's some fights, right?

Like internally, like there might be some tension between sales or sponsorship and the kind of things that we need to do, or the. Just the PNL in general, because it's not free to make sure that you do all these things correctly.

I think Jonah can speak to the fact, you know, I don't want to put up a bunch of smoke around like, oh, it's. It's so hard, it's so expensive. That's not.

What I'm trying to say is it can appear that way, but when you bring in someone like Green Disco, they can start to show you actually that it doesn't necessarily have to be that hard or expensive. It just has to be done smart, done right. And it needs to be prioritized.

So I'll stop there and maybe Jonah, you can jump in on how we found you and what your story is. Because really, frankly, without Green Disco giving us guidance, we would be kind of lost in the woods.

You know, we all as consumers can say something as simple as, well, we don't want any single use plastics. That's an easy thing to say.

How you execute that on the ground of a large scale event when you're going to have 30,000 people over the course of days who need water and how you cost sort of, you know, analyze that. You need someone who really does this for a living. And that's where I will pass it to you. John.

Mark Rabin

00:11:54.520 - 00:12:02.160

Well, but before, before you. Well, cj, thank you. Before you jump in, Jonah. I mean we know that most people die off the trail, 100 meters off the path.

CJ Jerard

00:12:02.160 - 00:12:02.520

Right.

Mark Rabin

00:12:02.680 - 00:12:42.450

So I think to bake it in at the beginning is really, there's a lot of vision there. So kudos to, to UCJ for identifying that. Jonah. Yeah. If you want to jump in and sort of like tell us, you know, working, what was it like?

So talk us through. CJ reached out to you. I mean, I don't know if he found you. Were you Googling, you know, like sustainability and entertainment?

CJ and then you found Jonah, like how, how did you guys meet? And then what does that process look like? And then Jonah, feel free to jump in as well if you've got some stats.

If you want to just start to share with our audience a little bit about what, what you've accomplished there too. But just. Yeah, take it away.

Jonah Geschwind

00:12:44.220 - 00:16:35.460

Yeah, well, I'd say. And then just thank you for the, the kind words as well. Cj, CJ is really the, the quarterback in the entire festival and everything.

So really when he set the overall goal and everything, they set the internal team instruction. He actually did an internal team at outside dedicated to sustainability.

On, on a corporate level they have kind of an internal team and then they also had some people dedicated to the festival and got connected to them. I would say, yeah, very, very early on. And it's not every day.

I don't think it's actually ever happened to us where we've ever been involved with a festival before it's even happened.

And that's a true testament just to outside and the values and actually putting their mouth where Their money is really, or their money where their mouth is and really investing in it from day one. And really I'd say the main focus for us was it's a first year festival that's never happened before.

So there's going to be fires, there's going to be mistakes and CJ has some crazy stories of things that have gone wrong. But of course we've made it work in crazy ways.

And in year one specifically the understanding was we're not going to be able to do everything, but let's really try to do as much as we can, improve a system, build a foundation that works and that we can really continue to expand and build upon. And I'd say did a few very level, very specific, high level things that any event can really do. One is we need what we call internal agreements.

And this is an agreement for every single stakeholder. It's not an agreement or it's not an agreement, it's an agreement and the agreement exactly.

Every, every stakeholder, whether it's a food vendor, whether they're providing energy to the festival, whether they're just a volunteer, they have to sign it.

And this agreement is specific to them, it has the policies, whether it's bringing their own bottle being zero waste, zero plastic, whether it's collecting specific data points.

And from the onset this established this, this foundation top down, that every vendor, everyone involved with the festival before it even happened, knew that sustainability was going to be a core and central part as a part of the onboarding documents. And when you get that buy in from, from a festival top down from CJ as well, that's really when it becomes a lot easier and a lot more efficient.

And you're playing smarter too. You're being proactive rather than reactive.

And so in year one had a ton of success and we were able to really prove a system, I'd say with energy specifically. We have an amazing production team, but they're been around for a while and they're pretty old school.

They've never seen new technology, these battery systems and ways to power events without diesel.

So the idea of integrating diesel system or non diesel systems in these batteries to power the festival food vendors, it was a very scary thought in 2024 and we're able to convince them to actually go and integrate some systems. We only had nine diesel generators powering everything on the festival besides the main stage, which for a festival of the size was pretty big.

And this next year, because we proved it out, we had six generators and the festival footprint increased pretty massively. We definitely needed more power, but we were able to do that with fewer. With fewer diesel generators.

And year after year, I think the data that we're collecting and the fact that we're continually proving success is just continually proving to the team that sustainability can be done in a way where it improves the fan experience.

Maybe it costs a little bit more at the upfront, but there's ways to actually make that money back in unique ways of integrating sponsorship and all those kind of other avenues that a lot of events aren't really thinking about. The way that you can cross pollinate sustainability.

Zena Harris

00:16:37.380 - 00:17:13.470

Yeah, it's super cool to hear. Like, year one, you, you know, you got a baseline, you figured out, like, what you could do.

And then year two, you know, kind of not only did the event expand, but you're. You're bringing down, you know, carbon footprint, if you will, or the number of diesel generators.

It's like, like sometimes you figure out like, we, we talk about, like, how do we even talk about sustainability? You know, it's not like a thing like you, you know, a noun, if you will. It's like it's a practice over time.

It's like we're evolving over time, and that's like you're capturing it so well and how you're talking about it. That's super cool.

Jonah Geschwind

00:17:14.830 - 00:18:05.300

And, and even on that, too, usually an event, or whoever it is, they will isolate sustainability into its own department or make it a very. Make it its own department to an extent.

When it is something that you need to work with ops, you need to work with waste, you need to work with supply chain and the actual materials that are being brought on site. You need to work with ticketing to integrate systems or you can track fan travel.

It's really something where you need that access across the board to be able to do it in a way where. Where the sum is greater than. Than. Than all the parts.

And so that's really kind of the way that outside has given us access and then really just embedded us into their kind of ops and production team has really allowed us to do a lot more than we've been able to do at the typical event. In that sense.

Mark Rabin

00:18:06.020 - 00:18:21.970

I love it. I mean, it just becomes part of the culture right out of the gate. And I mean, that's incredible. Maybe just so that we can have an idea of some stats.

Did you want to pull up? Do you have a slide with just some. Some key stats and, and you can get an idea of.

CJ Jerard

00:18:21.970 - 00:18:22.330

Of.

Mark Rabin

00:18:22.810 - 00:18:28.090

Of that? So we can. Yeah, so people understand the scope and scale. CJ, you mentioned 30, 000 people.

CJ Jerard

00:18:28.890 - 00:21:37.490

Yeah, maybe I can, I can give a little bit as, as Jonah pulls that up. Yeah. Some context around, like, well, what are we talking about in terms of the festival and, and the size and scope of it?

You know, and I think that in terms of how we built it, it's relevant also, you know, we brought that idea and we sort of thought, hey, you know, if we could get 10,000 people the first year, that would be great. You know, 18,000 people showed up. Right. Okay, well, if on the second year we get 25,000, that would be great. 36,000 showed up. Right. Oh, so what.

What that shows. And again, it's relevant here is that one. There was a thirst in the outdoor world for a gathering that was really very consumer based.

Like, there have been these trade shows, but this is bringing in the outdoor enthusiast as much as it is the outdoor industry. And that, that brought, you know, a fairly large scale, and we were ready for that. That was the really cool thing of working with Green Disco.

And the way that, you know, Joan has described how we've tried to integrate that idea of sustainability into all of the different workflows that we have.

So it's not just, you know, okay, the single use plastics, and it's having Jonah again and his team, who is really, really have a sense of where you want to bring that, that, that value of sustainability into all parts of the workflow. And what does that mean? Like, why is it. Why does it matter?

It's because the experience itself, which is ultimately what we're trying to create, we're trying to create a sticky experience where when you walk through those gates, you know, to get really kind of out there, right. The vibe is one that you're like, oh, this feels right. It feels good.

It feels like there's been care and thought put into every aspect of this, not just in one part of the signage or, okay, great, we were recycling, but then you're not kicking plastic bottles on your way out, like we've all done at 100 concerts, right. That there feels like someone actually put thought into this. And it. It. And the experience isn't harder because of it.

It actually is integrated into it in a way that it may, in some cases, it makes it feel easier. Right. Than it would if these things hadn't been thought about.

So sustainability doesn't just have to be about, like, what Jonah will show us here in a second about what the result is. The way we see it is very much is it improves the overall Experience for the, for the, the person, the attendee for our event.

And we expect to see upwards of 40,000 people this year and we're bringing that experience to all these people.

So that the word of mouth around our event is not just that it's great music, not just that they're great films and experiences and they saw someone famous like Alex Honnold is up on the screen here. But they actually also say, you know, it just felt good, it felt good to be in community. And I think the sustainability aspect is part of that.

In particular with our, you know, the audience outside caters to which is one that really cares about what happens to the planet and the outdoors naturally.

Jonah Geschwind

00:21:38.610 - 00:22:46.290

Yeah, yeah, I love it.

And I mean even as CJ was saying earlier, one of my favorite parts about the festival is just being able to like walk around and just seeing Alex Arnold speaking to a little group of people and just be like I had no idea he's even speaking now. Like I thought he was speaking yesterday.

But all these people are just so invested in the community and they're doing so many things just across the entire weekend. It felt inclusive and just having everyone outdoors in that sense.

And as mentioning too with energy specifically we essentially saw 95% reduction on fuel usage and compared to a fully diesel generator setup. And as mentioned we had six large batteries that were essentially powering or that were hybridized powering a majority of the outdoor footprint.

And then we had a lot of these. We had around 10 pre charged batteries that were actually pre charged mainly via the grid at sun belts facilities and then brought on site.

So use zero diesel energy on those setups and essentially we're able to power majority of the festival with fewer diesel generators. And even just one was one note

Mark Rabin

00:22:46.290 - 00:23:20.020

for folks listening on on Spotify or itunes that so this is an image of a hybridized setup where you have a large battery, you have a small little diesel generator, you have some distro there and basically you're pairing at your nodes, various nodes, a diesel generator and a battery or multiple batteries depending.

So you're able to literally just charge the battery straight directly and then the generator turns off and you're powering basically your stage production crafts, you know, wherever you are, your food court off of the battery.

Jonah Geschwind

00:23:20.900 - 00:24:39.170

It's a much more efficient system compared to just running fully diesel, even just jumping ship to I'd say material procurement and waste. This is say the more tangible side.

Not everyone's interacting with batteries or generators front of house but we really focused on very, very small things from Actually integrating signage where we could display facts from year one and all the data points that we did collect and displaying in a way where it's reusable. So how can we actually now display the amount of plastic.

Plastic or single use plastic cups and bottles that we avoided this year, which was around 190,000. So being able to use the same exact signage to represent new data points year over year.

And then cups, we were essentially able to eliminate all single use plastic cups on site through these reusable cups. They had little bands on them and carabiners so fans could just clip it on their backpack.

And as you guys could imagine with this audience too, that's a very outdoor focus community. These are cups that are actually taken home and using. We had less than a half a percent of these cups end up in the.

In the back of house waste stream. And we separated those cups from the waste stream and gave them to the back of house staff. So no cups ended up in the landfill.

Which is really cool to see.

Zena Harris

00:24:40.610 - 00:24:41.490

Yeah, that's even

Jonah Geschwind

00:24:43.810 - 00:25:48.850

another just small thing off the waist. But. And kind of goes back to last slide too. But we really focused on composting programs this year.

Last year we did a lot with a really cool local partner called Scraps. Scraps Mile High.

They do a lot of really, really unique work in the city to try to compost a lot of these materials that the city at large is not able to process. And with them, we essentially created this partnership.

We created a pre vetted list of all the materials that every single food vendor, every single sponsor should purchase. From covering everything from 1oz sample cup to deli craft paper, everything that a vendor could possibly need.

And we're able to see a 4x increase in the amount of compost waste and small things that we do. But actually take pictures of the waste at the facility. A lot of people say my recycled this or composted this.

But sadly a lot of the time it never really ends up at the facility. And we do very small things like photo verification to actually ensure that what we say happens. Because we don't want to be able to display it. No.

CJ Jerard

00:25:49.330 - 00:27:01.830

And I'll just. Jonah, just to give you kudos on that. Like that is so important to me.

You know, stewarding the brand of outside that the follow through is there's a paper trail to it to a degree. Right. And that that's even for me internally with the number of things that we're juggling to put us an event of this scale on it. What Green disco.

And Jonah, what They do around that is so helpful to leadership because I'm able to then run that all the way up, you know, to our CEO even, and say, look like this is all verified from the standpoint of that, that we are doing what we say we're doing, right? And that is, that's actually super important from a brand perspective.

Not that you put this out, you know, we're not, we're not doing a press release that shows this necessarily.

Like, there's a big pile of trash for the listeners, but we have it in our back pocket just to say, look, we, you know, it's helpful for leadership who has to speak to this to have that image in their mind, really, and say, no, we know how much we're. We're actually making sure that it lands where we say that it is, which is, you know, it's hard to do these things.

So it's helpful to have that verification.

Zena Harris

00:27:02.870 - 00:27:28.070

Yeah, totally.

I also feel like, you know, talking about fan experience, like, it actually like, closes the loop for, for fans as well, where, you know, you don't have to wonder. You can see, like, what actually happened with the stuff.

So that's super cool because that's like, you know, people always ask about that, well, what, what. What is going to happen with this stuff? Or, you know, did it actually go to the right place? So super important to, to be able to do that.

Jonah Geschwind

00:27:28.950 - 00:29:18.930

And people always. And this is more of the sustainability nerd in me, but they love to chase claims were zero waste.

We're carbon neutral, whatever it is, and zero waste technically, like the actual definition, if you look it up, it means 90% waste diversion or more. But there's still so much waste that's being generated, it's just getting recycled or composted and still 10% of it could end up in a landfill.

So saying it is very misleading. And we always like to. And with our clients and especially Outside, who likes to be very transparent and very bold too, it's just say it as you do it.

And if you do that, that's when it's very authentic and we find people resonate the most.

And one of the really interesting things when you look at a lot of these events is the hidden emitter is always in every single case, fan travel, it always makes up at least 60 to 80% of the overall carbon footprint. And it's something that a lot of organizers view as out of their. It's something that an event organizer has limited control over.

But working with outside has been incredible because every single lever that they can Possibly push or pull, they will and have done. And it's small things from within their website, making it very easy for fans to plan their travel partnership with the city.

Where a fan can easily go in, put in their address, see all the very accessible travel methods for them, making it super easy for fans to actually bike. As you guys can see this, all the pictures here for anyone listening on online is just filled with bikes.

So much so that people were even just filling up the park nearby with their bikes. We had around 30% of fans take sustainable form of travel to and from the event, which is a bike valet.

Mark Rabin

00:29:19.010 - 00:29:25.970

Is this a bike valet or this is just like you just provided sort of places where people could chain up their bikes.

Jonah Geschwind

00:29:26.290 - 00:31:01.600

It was just bike parking and making it super easy and accessible for people to to do it. A lot of times you'll find is if the event organizer doesn't provide the infrastructure incentive, it's very difficult for the fan to do it.

But when the organizer provides that incentive and provides the infrastructure, it really does improve the fan experience and it allows a family with a kid to actually feel comfortable bringing their bike and knowing that it's going to be safe, not be stolen. They have a place to put it, easy access to and from their place.

And the one other small thing I will mention is the footprint platform, which is something we built at Green Disco, which essentially is just the way we actually collect firsthand data on where fans are traveling from and how they're traveling. Something that at least a lot of event organizers rely on billings of codes to determine that which are highly inaccurate.

And so with outside, we've been able to integrate this system to ensure that we're collecting firsthand verified data on fan travel data.

So it's been awesome to be able to even just get that access to integrate our programs directly to ticketing so that as fans are filling out their ticketing survey, they actually have to input where they're traveling, how they're planning to.

And something really interesting too is we saw a little over 25% of the audience opt in to receive a personalized report after the event, which is huge. It's a fourth of the audience who actively wants to see what their impact is via travel.

And so we actually text them a custom report after that allows them to see their impact.

CJ Jerard

00:31:02.160 - 00:31:59.810

That's such a great example, Jonah, of how going back to the attendee experience and how important, you know, that is paramount for me as the organizer that, you know, I, I don't want to create friction. I want to create a Great experience.

And the fact that you've got folks who 25% are actually taking the time to do that, you know, there's more who are actually interested and who are at least registering when they see all of these different ways that it's integrated into the experience going, oh, that, that aligns with what I care about.

And that is like, there's actually a great effect in terms of this again, the stickiness and repeat visitors to and growing the event, which I would again just say, like this is where the, the business side of bringing in sustainability and making sure that there are folks who are really accountable for it within your organization can have that payback from a brand perspective. I mean that, that stat right there is a, is proof that people care about it.

Jonah Geschwind

00:32:00.290 - 00:32:00.770

Yeah.

CJ Jerard

00:32:01.010 - 00:32:01.330

So.

Mark Rabin

00:32:01.330 - 00:32:14.730

So Xena and I come for the next year. Can we rent? Do you have partnerships with like bike rental companies? Because we'll, we'll be coming in obviously from out of town.

Like, that's something that's like just first thing that comes in my mind, like, how do I get a bike?

CJ Jerard

00:32:14.730 - 00:32:50.500

Oh, Mark, that's a great idea.

Actually, you know, one that's one of the things we're trying to bundle up is how for the out of towners, we had 26% of folks came in from out of town last year. And we hope that that continues to grow for, for the economic viability for the city and everything else.

You know, a package that is this hotel plus in on where you can rent your bike or get dropped off. That's a good idea. You know, and maybe we could even look at the hotel part. Jonah, we should make a note of that. Mark, we'll give you credit for it.

Mark Rabin

00:32:50.500 - 00:32:55.700

Yeah, that's the first thing I thought about when I looked at all this. I'm like, I don't have a bike in Denver.

Zena Harris

00:32:55.860 - 00:32:58.660

How long do you get a bike there? Right, of course I will.

Jonah Geschwind

00:32:58.740 - 00:33:11.140

The micro mobility is too, is good. So it's like public, public access bikes. Those lift. Micro mobility bikes all that around too. But I made a note. Cj, It's a great point.

CJ Jerard

00:33:12.500 - 00:33:26.550

Jonah. Did we.

Within the, the bike parking zone, was there an area for like lime and you know, all the people coming in on scooters and you know, I, I don't recall that actually if there was kind of a.

Jonah Geschwind

00:33:27.030 - 00:33:44.560

It was, it was a separate area and it was, it was less official since this was actually formalized with the, with the city of tourism or with the tourism office. But there was a large volume of bikes, scooters parked, parked in an area unofficial drop off point.

CJ Jerard

00:33:45.040 - 00:33:51.520

That's, that's something for. I mean I think is it. It's mostly lime and bird, I think in Denver, right? That.

Jonah Geschwind

00:33:51.520 - 00:33:52.080

Yeah.

CJ Jerard

00:33:52.320 - 00:33:54.960

So maybe that's like another thing to follow up on.

Zena Harris

00:33:54.960 - 00:33:58.560

On the good sponsorship opportunity.

Mark Rabin

00:33:59.200 - 00:34:00.640

Yeah, exactly.

Jonah Geschwind

00:34:01.440 - 00:36:05.380

And, and with a lot of this too. It's like with the bike valet there's easy opportunity.

Like one thing that we, we've been thinking about is like getting a bike bike brand involved where we could do a giveaway to people who bring their bike. So there's so many opportunities to overlay not just like slap a brand logo here, but really aligned partners.

Like a brand, A bike brand wants to access people who are biking and we're giving them direct access to a thousand people who just used the bike, parked it. So that's visibility, that's, that's hard to get. Another really cool thing that we did.

And this kind of just shows kind of how across the board and across department is really working across food and beverage too.

And specifically with the hydration stations, we saw tons of people refilling using their water bottles, bringing camelbacks, as you can see from this picture, or even just bottles from home. We had a BYOB program campaign where people were bringing their own bottles and allowed to and back of house.

Something that not a lot of people know, but we actually had a whole program. So we had a few different donations, a few different partners.

The gathering place in St. Francis center, they were actually donating the leftover back of house staff catering meals to around 120 meals. 117 meals were donated in total. And we worked with a lot of the actual food vendors and a lot of them came back year over year.

So every single food truck that we talked to is like oh my God, it's green Disco. Again, don't get mad at us. We brought the right materials and they would show us that they were actually fully compliant.

And we had 100 compliance from every single food truck. As you can see this guy, they all had signage that we put that essentially said all the materials that you're getting here fully compostable.

So really finding those ways where we can get the food vendors excited involved in this because if they are, then it translates to the fans and really that top level buy in if the food vendor is not, if they don't know what they're serving or kind of in that sense than the fans totally lost.

Zena Harris

00:36:06.500 - 00:36:35.060

Gosh, that is such a great like such a great system and an observation too because like, I mean I can't tell you how many times we talk to, like, I work in film and TV and, you know, talk to caterers who are, like, begrudgingly doing a thing because they were told to. And this is kind of. You, like, flipped it and they're, like, excited to do the thing and, like, proud to put the sign in the window.

And, like, people know that's way to go. That's awesome.

Jonah Geschwind

00:36:36.820 - 00:38:03.640

At least just to kind of wrap it all together. It comes down to stakeholder engagement. And as I kind of started with, it's these agreements that are literally included in the onboarding documents.

So everyone as they're getting signed up for the event, they have to acknowledge compliance. Send this back to us to then the small things that we did of.

We had a green team, volunteer team of around 70 different amazing people who are on site, proactive, engaging with fans, signage that could be displayed on MainStage LED. It's not every day that an event will give you that real estate, but it really shows that outside cares about this.

The fact that they're actively displaying this across their LEDs and really small things too. But you can see even just this brand and company Radia, which is the one that actually built this shout out to them because they're amazing.

They essentially built this whole activation out of old T shirts taken from a Goodwill. The whole idea is address the elephant in the room.

Looking at textile waste and getting this brand reju that does some really, really cool stuff around recycling old textile waste and textiles and allowing them this onsite presence that engages with fans on a whole nother level where they can really, actually learn about sustainability in a whole nother industry. But the whole idea is these events are about discovery, whether it's new music, new food, and making sustainability a part of that.

That core experience has been something that we've been working on over two years now, which has been super exciting.

Mark Rabin

00:38:04.280 - 00:38:38.330

Jonah, how. And cj, how did you address, like, swag?

And, you know, you know, like, I think that's one of the things that I still struggle with the most is there's a lot of crap in swag and it's kind of plastic or garbage, and it's just literally single use swag and it's getting up in the garbage. I don't know. Like, that's always been a challenge. Like, how do you address that? Are you able. Are you able to direct some of that? Or do.

Do the vendors just know? They're just like. Like they're so aware that of their crowd that they.

They're Coming with really useful stuff that can be used and then upcycled or you know, put back into the recycling stream.

CJ Jerard

00:38:41.050 - 00:40:12.360

That's a good, good question. You know, I think is. And Jonah, you can jump in.

I think as Jonah said, the sort of our, how we bring in sponsors and our, our commitment to sustainability and that being communicated early helps put everybody in that mindset. And I do think that we have a built in advantage with sustainability given the audience.

Again like you're just naturally getting people who are, they're going to outside days like they're thinking about the planet to a certain degree. We certainly. There were a ton of giveaways. I don't.

And my kids were there grabbing stuff, you know, so I don't recall there being to, you know, anything that kind of like I was giving side eye to like wait a minute.

I think that there was actually a lot of sort of natural compliance to that as, as these brands want to show up in a way that is connecting with again with the, the overall experience. I don't know Jonah, if we in those agreements we have a checklist on that at all. That's you know, something that was like officially signed off on.

But it did seem that there's, there's sort of.

It's about the culture and about the overall brand and people seem to like kind of find their way with it when you really have it up front and center. Was that something like in terms of giveaways that we addressed at all officially? Jono?

Jonah Geschwind

00:40:13.080 - 00:41:54.110

Yeah, and it was in the agreements.

It's something that exactly is as CJ is saying, it's built in like if a vendor, if someone's popping up a swag, it was usually a reusable watermark that was functional and a fan could use and take home and actually get some sort of value out of. But there's also some people handing out stickers and whatever it is, even the nature of the festival, it's as CJ is saying, so inclusive.

It's free for kids. Like they want families to come.

And because of that you're getting random diapers that are finding their way into the waste stream and all sorts of things.

So it's one of those events by nature because it is more than just a music festival, much more than just a music festival where a lot of these waste streams are very hard to control. You're talking about 150 vendors and partners who are popping up on site, which is also hard to have 100% compliance on.

But for the most part everyone shows up in A way that's, that's very aligned.

And if someone does maybe have something that was non compliant or they didn't understand it was not intentional, where they're just like, oh, I'm so sorry, I had no idea, like, we're not going to do this. And you even just saw that with the food vendors, where in year one, a lot of them didn't necessarily follow suit. This was a new event for them.

It was a new kind of policy for them to adhere to. But in year two, it was a joke. And if anything, like, we were friends because of it.

And I think that's something that just year over year, it's never all going to happen. The day you plant the seed is not the day it grows. So you see those improvements year over year.

CJ Jerard

00:41:54.270 - 00:43:50.600

That's such a great way to put it, Jonah.

And I would, I would bring that back to like the, the alignment from the beginning and that, that is a, it's a privilege to like be able to build something from the beginning and you know, not have to retrofit to a certain degree by creating, you know, giving a mandate.

And you know, we, Kristen Hostetter, who is no longer with outside, but was there at the beginning, you know, was that person internally on our staff. And I will always give her credit for taking that job so seriously within our organization. And like I said, it wasn't especially at the beginning.

It's the hardest at the beginning.

And as Jonah says, like, once you set the tracks, it gets easier to a degree because people, there's clarity and expectation in terms of, oh, we, we know this program. It's. You're not having that first conversation anymore. But giving, giving somebody internally the mandate to be able to, to in it.

Actually with Kristen, it was like, this is your job is to be the person that kind of like people are like, oh gosh, here we go again. We got to talk about sustainability, right?

Like, it's in every conversation and her contribution and the contribution from some of the folks who, like, like John Dorn and others who were leading that first year and having that buy in from sales also you have to make believers of everybody in the organization on why something like this is important and what the payoff can be. And once you get that, it's just as Jonah described.

I think you start to see over time that people go, okay, I know what the program here is and I see it. And it's not something that I'm going to kick back against, actually. I'm going to embrace it.

But all that goes Back to like setting the mandate early, I think in order to really see success long term.

Mark Rabin

00:43:51.800 - 00:43:59.560

What's interesting too, it's got me thinking. I mean, I'm sure those vendors, maybe they just continue using this packaging versus. Versus going back.

CJ Jerard

00:43:59.720 - 00:44:00.120

Right.

Mark Rabin

00:44:01.080 - 00:44:11.470

You know, that would be the hope as, I mean, obviously this cascades out into the. Everybody goes back to their daily lives, but they. They're keeping these materials practices going.

Jonah Geschwind

00:44:11.550 - 00:44:37.310

So, I mean, yeah, it's funny, funny you say that because we actually have this live URL that was made for all the different vendors and we've tracked purchases that have been made post festival. So we know that vendors have actually gone back, used our discount codes and have actually continued to order these compostable. Compostable goods.

So it does carry out of the event. It may take some time.

CJ Jerard

00:44:37.760 - 00:44:38.080

It's.

Jonah Geschwind

00:44:38.160 - 00:44:38.960

But it does happen.

CJ Jerard

00:44:39.360 - 00:45:17.870

Joan.

It's probably even, you know, you mentioned earlier our production partner, Groundswell, you know, who initially, like, some of these things were different. I'm. I'm sure that they're probably even applying it in other areas too. Right.

Like, you see the sort of the ripple effect of it when it's done in the way that Green Disco and Outside have partnered on that, you know, not only with. For our event, but then people are educated and they start to see like, oh, wait, there's benefit.

And then this doesn't have to necessarily be more expensive, harder. If you do it the right way, it actually is just a benefit to the attendance and to your business.

Zena Harris

00:45:19.310 - 00:45:45.220

So I'm curious there, like, how did the conversations evolve with like, the city and maybe other stakeholders that you were engaging early on to, you know, get this thing off the ground, and then they see the, you know, how it plays out and, and, you know, year one, year two, and, you know, the sustainability element, how things are integrated, how people are, you know, engaging and all that. How do those conversations change?

CJ Jerard

00:45:48.340 - 00:48:06.660

How have they changed? I think it's interesting when you're dealing, you know, it's. It's political. Right?

So, I mean, we've been so grateful to have the support of the state and the city. They really. I can't say enough good things about even some of our partners coming from out of.

Out of Colorado to help who are used to doing these things in other major metro areas being like, wow, is everybody in Colorado just like, so nice? And I don't necessarily think that's always the case.

I think it's because from the beginning, we presented a very clear vision that had these values that could align with leadership. So that they could.

In a lot of ways, it is kind of like cover your butt in all of these kind of political environments where if there's air cover on a leadership level, it's easy for people to get on board when the values are aligned. So in terms of that changing, in our case, I don't think a lot has changed because again, and I keep going back to it, but I think that the time.

It's the old adage of measuring twice. Right. We spent a lot of time at the beginning really figuring out what we wanted the brand and the vision of this thing to be.

And sustainability and inclusivity in particular were so aligned with Colorado's brand that it has been pretty smooth sailing with those partners. And look, it's a city. There's all sorts of different competing angles. Always. I don't want to, you know, there are always challenges. Right.

And the more that you can have an alignment at the leadership level, it makes those challenges less kind of obstructive because everyone says, well, we do want this to happen. Right. We're not trying to stop you from doing it. You are adding value to our community.

But, you know, there's some hoops you have to jump through and whatever. Like, that's normal. So it actually hasn't been a big change. It's. It's. It's been sort of from.

And I hope it doesn't change because it's pretty good with our partners in it right now around the city and the state.

Zena Harris

00:48:06.980 - 00:48:18.820

Yeah. Well, it sounds like you. You did what you said you were going to do, and that builds trust. And then, you know, you know, you executed on it.

And, and that's really important.

CJ Jerard

00:48:19.700 - 00:49:35.960

So, yeah, from a brand perspective, that's always, you know, understanding is sort of the first step and helping partners understand what your vision is. And if you do what you. You say you outline a vision, then you do what you say you do, as you said, then that naturally leads to trust.

And then, you know, trust and understanding equals, like, really strong brand. Right. I think we've, you know, sustainability has been part of that formula for us.

And I would say again, to bring it back to the business leaders who are, who are listening. You know, if you are, if you believe brand is part of your strategy, which I'm biased. I'm a chief brand officer.

Like, I think brand is very important. Right. If you believe that and you're. But you're trying to run an exercise on how do you, how do you get that trust with your brand?

One way to do that is to Lean into these areas like sustainability, where you can demonstrate that you are doing what you say you do and that you're sticking to your values and that leads to trust. And ultimately that is what is really behind brand in a lot of ways.

Mark Rabin

00:49:37.480 - 00:50:27.090

So one sort of slightly divergent question for Jonah here as we round out the podcast.

Knowing what you know here now and what you've learned at, at outside festival or outside days, how does this translate then to a festival that you're working with, that's already going, that's entrenched in their ways? Because you have worked with many other larger festivals or in different parts of North America, because that's something interesting, right?

There's tons of learnings here, tons of takeaways. I love the embedding it from the beginning. I mean that's a, that's a winner.

But yeah, there's so many other events that are struggling and they're, you know, you probably like, it's like running up against the wall and you're trying to figure out how to change that culture. And these are like high level thoughts and key takeaways on that as you, as you sort of take this learning into your other projects.

CJ Jerard

00:50:28.050 - 00:50:28.610

It's.

Jonah Geschwind

00:50:28.690 - 00:51:51.490

Yeah, it's a rare luxury to work with, with outside in a first year event too. But you will. I would say that as I said before, it's just, it takes time. The day you plant the seed isn't the day it grows.

And what we always try to do is just plant. See, I literally call myself a seed planter and water most of the days. But that's, that's what we do.

And like we're going to come out with an impact report with one of our partners. Deeptropics will be a five year accumulative impact report. And we didn't start working with them in year one.

It was year four or year three when we started working with them. But you'll see over the past five years we've been able to create a crazy trend in progress.

And year after year, year after year proving, I mean as CJ Said, his outside is done. It's, it's that trust.

It's saying it's doing as you say that you would do and executing it and continually proving it is when you get that trust and understanding and then you're able just to execute more. We bring new ideas to the table. Hey, what about this type of program?

What if we did offsite rainwater catchment system to help you guys actually go net positive on water usage? Crazy ideas that no one would ever listen to in year one actually get kind of listened to in year three or year four.

So it just takes time and we always start small.

The agreements, I always say, are just like the most simple but most effective first step, and you kind of just grow from there if you continue to water that seed.

CJ Jerard

00:51:53.570 - 00:51:54.130

Awesome.

Zena Harris

00:51:54.530 - 00:52:00.130

Well, CJ and Jonah, like, really appreciate you walking us through this.

Mark Rabin

00:52:00.210 - 00:52:00.730

Jonah.

CJ Jerard

00:52:00.730 - 00:52:00.930

Where.

Mark Rabin

00:52:00.930 - 00:52:03.330

Where can people find out about green disco?

Jonah Geschwind

00:52:04.210 - 00:52:07.980

Greendisco Earth not.com Earth cool.

Zena Harris

00:52:08.380 - 00:52:12.060

Can you just tell us when the festival happened?

CJ Jerard

00:52:12.140 - 00:53:05.170

Like, yeah. Outside days will be May 28 to May 31 this year. The weekend after Memorial Day is our always our our weekend in Denver, Downtown Denver.

You can find out more by going to outside-days.comoutside-days.com where you can get tickets both to the industry event on the 28th and 29th and to the three days of music Friday night, Saturday and Sunday. Kids under 12 are free.

We'd love to see you in Denver to come join community and music and film and food and tons of outdoor experiences, from rock walls to cold plunges and saunas to biking and running. All those things in one place on campus. So. So, Zena and Mark, we expect to see you there. And we'll get you some bikes and come to Denver.

Mark Rabin

00:53:05.330 - 00:53:08.050

Yeah, we'll do some live podcasting from there.

Zena Harris

00:53:08.290 - 00:53:11.810

Yeah, that's right. Meet you in Denver. That's great.

CJ Jerard

00:53:12.850 - 00:53:15.970

We have the setup for that if you want to do it. Cool.

Zena Harris

00:53:16.050 - 00:53:16.450

All right.

CJ Jerard

00:53:16.450 - 00:53:16.930

Awesome.

Mark Rabin

00:53:16.930 - 00:53:17.410

Thanks.

Zena Harris

00:53:19.730 - 00:53:32.380

Our designer is Aaliyah Kane. Music is by Peter Chapman. Social media is by Sharon Yuen. Our editor and producer is Rachel Werbell.

Brad Johnson

00:00:00.160 - 00:00:05.360

We have to take the entire grid as it exists today, modify it and add additional capacity.

Zena Harris

00:00:05.760 - 00:00:18.640

Hi, this is Zena Harris and I'm Mark Raben. Welcome to the tie in. In this week's episode of the Tie in, Mark, you took us to the conference Distributech and interviewed a handful of people.

Troy Daniels

00:00:18.720 - 00:00:42.040

I'm excited to present this, this episode this week, continuing to find new ways to tell a story of what's going on. And of course, you know, my background being in energy and energy technology.

Yeah, it's exciting to be able to share some of the insights into the world of grid power and batteries.

Zena Harris

00:00:42.760 - 00:01:00.330

Yeah, I mean, honestly, it's like peeling an onion. You know, you think you know what, you know what there is to know.

And then you go to like these conferences that are very focused on grid systems and various technologies and you're like, oh, wow, okay. And I bet it was fun for you though.

Troy Daniels

00:01:01.210 - 00:03:05.690

Totally. It's just like with my fellow fellow energy nerds, everybody's just so open and willing to talk about what they're doing.

You know, compared to other industries, that can be a little more kg. But there's no, there's no, there's no secrets in this business. It's pure industrial might.

And the other thing too is, you know, people take energy and electricity for granted, but behind the scenes, I mean, you see sometimes, you know, poles and wire lines, maybe you see some high voltage ones, maybe there's a substation near you. But other than that, most of this infrastructure's out of sight, out of mind. And the other thing too, I always say, is you can't fake it, right?

It's like it's either on or it's off. And when it's on, people notice very little. Right? Until it's off. And then people lose their shit.

Even when the electricity is not on for like an hour. I mean, there were 20,000 people at the show, like huge mega exhibitors. But I did end up getting a pretty great cross section of folks.

One Bentley doing software for the grid and software for engineers Span IO, they're making like a really innovative smart panel and they've got a new product as well, like really, really cool. On sort of like our management stuff. There was box power. I've been following those guys for a long time. They're doing like micro grid stuff.

And then of course Burritti doing the, doing the batteries and they're doing like, they're like, they've, they've really pulled ahead and are like the leader in mobile, mobile storage. They're the Ones who bought the mo. You know, Moxion company out of foreclosure. And so. Yeah. And bought their plant. So you'll hear come that.

That conversation. And everybody's just so smart and tuned in. And so, you know, I was just trying to keep up with. With what they're talking about.

Zena Harris

00:03:06.330 - 00:03:17.740

Love that. I love that. It kind of makes, you know, it's like, you know, this like, intellectual, like, like your best. It's so great. It's like.

Because that's what takes forward. Right?

Troy Daniels

00:03:17.740 - 00:03:34.140

Yeah, yeah.

And it also, like, again, people don't think about it, but, you know, a lot of these movie studios and film entertainment are still all based on access to power and cheap power.

Zena Harris

00:03:34.380 - 00:03:34.900

Yeah.

Troy Daniels

00:03:34.900 - 00:03:50.210

You know, part of the conversations we had many years ago was like, oh, well, how are these studios going to get power? Because they're put up in like a ramshackle warehouse that wasn't in. Wasn't intended to have big studio power requirements.

Zena Harris

00:03:51.650 - 00:04:21.530

Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is like the dilemma between, you know, purpose built and, you know, filming wherever you can get space. Right.

And that's the big question is power. And everybody needs it. And then it goes from, you know, can we plug it in to like, how can it be mobile? Because we're all over the place.

We're all over the city and all of that and we need it now. So that's, you know, mobile power was, you know, top of mind back in the day when we were thinking about how to do this differently.

Hal Corin

00:04:21.530 - 00:04:21.810

Right.

Troy Daniels

00:04:21.810 - 00:04:42.680

So.

Yeah. And also, I mean, a lot of studios were just running big diesel generators behind the studio. In the studio. Yeah, right. I mean, that. That was a thing.

And then all of a sudden everybody was like, oh, how are we going to get EVs, how are we going to charge EVs so we can't use EVs and like, okay, let's figure out how to get charging into the studios. And like, well, we don't own the building.

Zena Harris

00:04:42.680 - 00:04:44.440

And I mean, layers.

Troy Daniels

00:04:44.440 - 00:04:45.400

Turns it on and on.

Zena Harris

00:04:45.720 - 00:05:02.680

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm telling you, Mark, like, that whole running diesel generators on the studio lot is not like years ago kind of thing.

That was like last year because we just got off a show where that happened and we were like, trying to figure that out. But anyway. Yeah, yeah.

Troy Daniels

00:05:04.850 - 00:05:14.770

So it's a lot of fun. So. Yes, I hope people enjoy that. And. Yeah. And then you're gonna be. I guess not south by Southwest. That's coming up.

Zena Harris

00:05:14.770 - 00:05:27.650

Yeah, yeah.

A little teaser coming up in March. I'll be at south by Southwest. I'm a mentor again this year, so that's pretty fun. Anyway, good episode. Good, good, fun interviews from the field.

Troy Daniels

00:05:27.730 - 00:05:32.060

Short and sweet. Thanks. Short and sweet. Hopefully people listen to it.

Zena Harris

00:05:32.300 - 00:05:36.780

Yeah. All right, well, don't forget to like and subscribe and we will see you guys soon.

Brad Johnson

00:05:39.340 - 00:06:04.820

Hi, I'm Brad Johnson, Director of Electric Utilities with Bentley Systems.

We provide infrastructure software around the world, helping solve the challenges that infrastructure owners, operators, engineering firms are facing. Especially as more and more pressure is put on infrastructure.

Whether it's digital twins, design software, assessing the built environment, natural environment, we provide those technologies to professionals everywhere.

Mark Rabin

00:06:05.300 - 00:06:11.500

Right, so you guys are providing end to end solutions at anywhere that the grid is happening. Is that true?

Brad Johnson

00:06:11.500 - 00:06:39.660

Yeah, it sounds pretty lofty, but we really do. I mean, electricity works largely the same way. Each country that we work in is at a different stage in their evolution of their grids.

You know, whether it's in India where they have a truly world class transmission system, or we look at some of the really exciting distribution system advancements happening here in the US we offer solutions that help primarily in that physical engineering side or assessing what's out there today. So, yeah, right.

Mark Rabin

00:06:39.660 - 00:06:48.860

And there's a lot of talk right now about data centers and AI and almost like the grid breaking right now. This is a good opportunity to get in there.

Brad Johnson

00:06:48.940 - 00:07:25.510

Yeah, you know, I've been having conversations about that and I kind of mentioned that there's more stress on the grid than there has been before. We're at a point where we have about 140 years worth of work to do in the next summer.

It's not that we have to expand the grid x percent or X times over. We have to take the entire grid as it exists today, modify it and add additional capacity.

So that's why I think like 140 years of work to do in seven years is a bit more meaningful, I think does a better job of capturing what's actually before us and why it's so urgent that professionals in our industry adopt new technologies to get these problems solved.

Mark Rabin

00:07:25.750 - 00:07:36.870

Totally. And I heard a friend say, oh yeah, there's a bunch of private equity guys walking around here right now.

And I was like, well, that's the first time in 100 years that's really happened. But it's funny, it's a funny time for the grid.

Hal Corin

00:07:36.870 - 00:07:37.070

Right.

Mark Rabin

00:07:37.070 - 00:07:41.190

After 100 years of like just keeping the lights on and giving things moving steady.

Brad Johnson

00:07:42.390 - 00:08:47.240

I think it's, I think it underscores just how central, reliable, affordable and resilient energy delivery is to every facet of our lives these days, you know, people who previously hadn't been interested in utilities before are becoming interested is a sign that they understand that, you know, this part of the supply chain relies on affordable energy for it to remain sustainable. And even as a going concern, data centers are obviously putting a big finger on the scale as it relates to investment.

But even if the data center development were to ever slow down, I think we would see that we're really still just catching up on a backlog of work that had to take place anyway.

And as we electrified more and more of our lives, whether it's heating or cooking or manufacturing or what have you, getting away from natural gas or other fossil fuels, the importance for how reliable the grid is, the amount that there's sufficient capacity and margin above that for elasticity and demand, I think we're just going to see more and more interest in helping get these problems solved.

Mark Rabin

00:08:47.320 - 00:09:05.960

Absolutely. And this is kind of where AI and software come in.

We heard of a keynote this morning with Dex is like for every engineer now at a software company, they're doing the job of 10 engineers. Everybody's using AI. And is that same similar in the grid software world?

Brad Johnson

00:09:06.880 - 00:10:19.410

I was just having a conversation with somebody about that topic and we were talking about how in the industry it's important that it's not just AI for AI sake. There are plenty of examples of AI for AI sake, not just in the utility space, but I think in just about every industry.

The things that get me excited about what we're doing at Bentley are we're doing AI for engineering reasons.

We're helping to accelerate the pace that work gets done by engineers so that they don't feel overburdened by the stack of plans that are sitting at their desk waiting to be completed. I mean think about it, that's actually a quality of life improvement.

And we're not talking about replacing engineers, we're talking about dealing with the fact that we just don't have enough engineers to get that 140 years of work done.

So unless we're going to grind them all down because they're so overloaded, we have to use technology, we have to use practical applications of AI, for example, helping facilitate work that follows the sun tearing down the language barrier on these cross functional teams where the substation design might have hands on it in four different countries speaking four different languages.

These are those use cases that we're addressing and I think are the kind of ones that start to build industry confidence that it's not just all AI for AI Sake.

Mark Rabin

00:10:19.570 - 00:10:25.650

Yeah. That's amazing. Such an exciting world. Where can folks find out a little bit more about Bentley?

Brad Johnson

00:10:26.050 - 00:10:47.190

Find us at Bentley. On socials, you can find me out there, you can find US Online or LinkedIn and you can find us in your community.

Likely a utility near you, but super exciting for our participation around the world. I'll be in Sydney in a couple months sharing stories with our users there and yeah, find us anywhere.

Rithy Chhean

00:10:47.190 - 00:11:21.770

Hi, I'm Rithy Chhean with Box Power. I'm vice president of technology. My teams do product and product services, but we're also a full EPC company.

On the product and product services side, we have array of products from really complex microgrid control systems and grid interface systems that can productize and make microgrid simple to services such as field commissioning, field integration. O and M services will maintain microgrid systems for our customers for the duration of the life of the microgrid operation.

Mark Rabin

00:11:22.180 - 00:11:30.980

Right.

And I can see photos behind you guys look like you're focused on truly off grid microgrid solutions. Is that still a fact today or is that. That was how you guys started?

Rithy Chhean

00:11:31.220 - 00:11:53.170

That's more of how we started. I think that's where we really learned how to do really complex microgrid controls, make sure we have really reliable systems.

And so we take that and now we can, you know, do grid connected systems. That's seamlessly island and reconnect seamlessly as well. So basically, even though we're connecting and disconnecting, nobody knows the difference.

Mark Rabin

00:11:53.330 - 00:12:05.090

Right, Right. So right now we're at a big grid conference. How do you guys interface with the grid at large and where do you guys see microgrids playing a role in the current power grid?

Rithy Chhean

00:12:05.250 - 00:12:23.190

Yeah, I think we're very different than most microgrid companies. So our focus is utility grade microgrid products and systems. Most of our customers are utilities.

Ourselves, we're building utility assets that are microgrid systems to serve their customer because it's the most cost effective, the most reliable and the fastest to deploy.

Mark Rabin

00:12:23.590 - 00:12:23.910

Right.

Hal Corin

00:12:23.910 - 00:12:25.470

So you're predominantly then behind the meter

Mark Rabin

00:12:25.470 - 00:12:29.670

or in front of the meter, like you're working with the utility or with the customer sort of in this power

Rithy Chhean

00:12:29.670 - 00:12:40.390

predominantly on the utility side. We're in front of the meter. If we're working CNI for the customer, we're behind the meter. But we can do both, which is sort of weird.

So we can do both behind the meter and in front of the meter.

Mark Rabin

00:12:40.390 - 00:12:45.510

Right. And are you selling your hardware or do you, do you work with them as A micro utility.

Rithy Chhean

00:12:46.340 - 00:13:40.120

We do both. So we have an EPC business that will do full turnkey microgrid systems for you.

We'll design it, we'll procure it, we'll build it, we'll commission it and turn it over. We have a full product suite that we could either use on our EPC side or we can sell it direct to customers that want to use our products.

One of the key differences is we started off with a containerized microgrid system. And so that's a microgrid in the box, right? Yeah, generator, battery, solar, all in one box.

We now took that and made metaphysical boxes for our microgrids. So we have small or mini, medium and large microgrid systems. Even the large, many like 8 megawatt hour microgrid system, 5 megawatts of PV.

Those are still standardized products that we've used because we've integrated, we've tested it, we've pre engineered it. And so it's not first of its kind. It's things we do all the time. It's just how many do you need?

Mark Rabin

00:13:40.230 - 00:13:49.710

So it's modular, sort of main. You sort of standardize on the product and the product itself and it's just modular. Yeah.

Rithy Chhean

00:13:49.710 - 00:14:18.800

And we de risk everything because we've already pre integrated, pre tested, pre engineered it.

Which a lot of times is you work with someone that may not know all these nuances or even if they don't, they do, they find out these issues in the field. We've worked through all of that so that we know everything about it.

So when we go to deploy them, it's not oh, all of these issues end up at the end. That increases cost or increases time to power. We figure it out. So it's more, less variation and more reliable in terms of when we can deploy power.

Right.

Mark Rabin

00:14:18.880 - 00:14:22.720

What's the most exciting project that you guys have installed a microgrid on?

Rithy Chhean

00:14:23.520 - 00:15:06.850

That's good question. For me specifically, I started off working at Chevron where we did grid systems around the world.

And so we have like 200 megawatt sites in the jungles of Indonesia. Right. Things like that. And so what keeps me, I guess motivated is what is the microgrid being used for?

Yeah, and so I think we're working with a project with NV that is going to power like take over 200, 200 homes in the mountains.

And so that's really interesting to me because without that, you know, they have potential like reliability issues during the fire season because the power lines potentially could cause a fire.

Mark Rabin

00:15:07.650 - 00:15:16.690

And lots of Talk about data centers, speed to power. You know, everybody wants gigawatts of power. Where do you guys fit in all that?

Rithy Chhean

00:15:17.250 - 00:15:25.840

So that's interesting. I think a lot of people are chasing that. We're not a gigawatt scaler today. Maybe, maybe next, maybe tomorrow, but not today.

Mark Rabin

00:15:25.840 - 00:15:26.200

Right.

Rithy Chhean

00:15:27.160 - 00:16:01.560

But if you're in the, let's say 20 megawatts and down, we can definitely help. I think one of the key things is because of our close connections with the utility, our understanding of what they require.

If we can do flexible interconnections, we could do a phased approach where we can get you power sooner. Maybe it's not full power, but we can scale up as your data center scaling. So I think there is a place where we can help data centers.

But I think it's true for basically everybody. Everybody needs power as soon as possible and it's hard. There's a scarcity in terms of available power today.

Mark Rabin

00:16:02.280 - 00:16:05.320

Amazing. Thank you. So where can people find out About Box Power?

Rithy Chhean

00:16:05.960 - 00:16:08.840

BoxPower IO is our website. Please go there.

Troy Daniels

00:16:09.000 - 00:16:20.840

Hey, Troy Daniels here with Span technical account manager here. We're at dtech for talking about our smart panel technology. Specifically looking here at the Span edge.

Mark Rabin

00:16:22.680 - 00:16:26.600

Very cool. All right. What does Span Edge do?

Troy Daniels

00:16:27.320 - 00:17:24.390

Yeah, so Span Edge is probably our newest, most exciting product. Span Edge is actually a, you can look at it as a two bar product.

It is a meter intercept device where we can actually capture the service rate from the meter and where we can actually hang the span panel. So just like our traditional residential panels, we have all the intelligence built in where we can monitor, we can control individual circuits.

Well, what this product is so unique is now we can allow for a much easier installation, very utility focused here where we're actually able to intercept from the meter and still add in the span panel. Think of it as a parallel service.

So you know, from there there's just a ton of opportunity to run different programs from the utility side, maybe demand response programs and really give the utility a fleet level view of everything that is in these panels. And right now they don't have that, that view.

Hal Corin

00:17:25.110 - 00:17:25.390

No.

Mark Rabin

00:17:25.390 - 00:17:27.790

I mean, unless it's a smart. I mean what's a smart meter?

Troy Daniels

00:17:27.790 - 00:17:52.340

Does something similar Smart meter. I mean if we're talking about, you know, the AMI system and looking at where smart meters are right now, tons of growth obviously.

But when we're talking about circuit level data, we're really unparalleled there and, and think about it like this.

When we're talking about the fleet view, we're often talking about Minute interval data on each individual circuit with each individual circuit identified.

Mark Rabin

00:17:52.980 - 00:18:03.700

So I think that would be like your car, your stove, everything else, your hot water tank, I mean, everything would just be all on that. And then the utility can, can kind of control that.

Troy Daniels

00:18:04.170 - 00:18:54.720

Yeah, I think about most likely large loads in here. Right. You might still have a panel downstream, you might still have your normal home service downstream. Yeah, that'd be great. I love that.

I would hope you'd have a span downstream as well. But when you're talking about, you know, the larger loads in here, like an EVSC electric heat pump. Right.

These are loads that are, you know, can cause service upgrades. So we can avoid that service upgrade.

We can also help the utility avoid costly upgrades on their infrastructure side by enabling them to use the power control system that is span. It's an energy management system. It's listed to both those things, so it can control those loads.

And basically we can look at it as we can control service across a larger fleet now and keep that service size where we want it to be. Right.

Mark Rabin

00:18:54.720 - 00:18:58.240

So like air conditioning, for example, on a really hot day, would that be tied into something like this?

Troy Daniels

00:18:58.540 - 00:19:17.180

Yeah, it could be. I think, you know, the, the cool thing here is I like, I love the idea of air conditioning.

So we think about, you know, thermostat programs have been something for so long and that tends to be the only thing the utility company can say, hey, we're going to, we want control of this for our own purposes when, when spikes are high.

Mark Rabin

00:19:17.260 - 00:19:17.740

Yeah.

Troy Daniels

00:19:18.140 - 00:19:57.830

And, and that tends to affect a customer's comfort. They notice that oftentimes. Sure, we can do that here. But what we can also do is something like an EVSE or maybe a resistive water heater.

That's something customers most likely not going to notice.

So by identifying the loads and even letting the homeowner have some flexibility of their priorities, we're just worried about that bottom line number. We say, hey, we need to reduce that. Each panel in the fleet by 10amps.

Let the customer decide which load is actually being controlled instead of just saying it's always your. So is your air conditioning. Yeah, yeah, tons of flexibility there.

Mark Rabin

00:19:57.830 - 00:19:58.510

That's amazing.

Hal Corin

00:19:58.510 - 00:19:58.950

Yeah.

Mark Rabin

00:19:59.030 - 00:20:11.830

And so is your strategy that you're going into specific regions and then trying to get all the homes in that region on board, or are you putting these anywhere in the US and just starting like that?

Troy Daniels

00:20:12.230 - 00:20:52.560

Yeah, it's a good question. I think adoption on this product is definitely going to, I would argue is still going to be kind of coming down to the utility Right, right.

They're the biggest partner here that we can think about, is really going to be able to implement these at scale to make an impact. Yeah. Now of course we've got our residential side, you know, something that a customer would purchase and there's still the same benefits.

You still have the service upgrade avoidance, but that's really more the customer. The customer knowing that they need that.

Whereas this is so focused in on how do we make bigger change on a bigger infrastructure and avoid large scale infrastructure upgrades.

Mark Rabin

00:20:52.560 - 00:21:05.040

Exactly, yeah. And how do electricians like these things? Because, I mean, they're not quite your standard panel. Do they need training on it?

Are they resistant to like this kind of new tech?

Troy Daniels

00:21:06.080 - 00:22:35.010

I'm biased, but I'll say this, I think truly well, first and foremost, the Gen 3 platform, which is every, every panel you see here today is our newest Gen3 platform. Much more user friendly to the electricians themselves, which for me is, you know, close to my heart. Like I've been in the field myself.

Gen 2, I would argue is a little bit more technology heavy where now we've taken the same technology, upgraded it, but made this more of a user friendly. There's more space, there's better knockouts. The commissioning aspect of it might be scary to some folks.

It's really intuitive, it's really easy, it's really guiding when we're talking about things like firm service rating, which is our, hey, we're going to virtually set a service rating and it's not going to go above that panel. That's just the figure that they put into the panel. It guides them right through that.

The edge is extremely unique for installers because we think about, again, you might have a meter tech that actually comes out and installs this part of the device here. So meter tech might pull off here, put the whip on, connect it and really they could even hang this box here.

No loads inside of it, no electrician needed at that point. The electrician would be somebody that would come afterwards and actually start putting in loads.

Think about it the same way as if you got a heat pump installed any other time. They're just, they know where they're going to put it now because they've got all this space and all this service available here.

Mark Rabin

00:22:35.410 - 00:22:38.290

Can you put a battery under that too? Like, is this where the battery would come in?

Troy Daniels

00:22:38.760 - 00:23:03.240

You can put a battery here. So you would arguably land on. I almost went to the top, definitely to the bottom, opposite end of the bus bar.

This is where you probably land your battery, your solar. So you could have those assets landed here as well?

And, you know, we see that all the time where a solar system or a battery might trigger a service upgrade. This could help avoid that.

Mark Rabin

00:23:03.480 - 00:23:06.880

So what's next for span? You know, I've been following you guys

Hal Corin

00:23:06.880 - 00:23:07.480

for a long time.

Mark Rabin

00:23:07.480 - 00:23:22.820

You guys have had some great success so far as being the industry leader. Yeah, I'm sure you got lots of folks nipping at your tail, but what's, what's, what's next? You're looking at the utility space. You're at a big, huge.

Yeah, crazy conference here with big old

Troy Daniels

00:23:22.980 - 00:23:58.730

utility power guys and little old span. No, I mean, it's a good question.

I think markets are changing, so traditionally, you know, we've always kind of stood in the solar battery space, the small residential, electrical, and I don't think that's ever going to change. And I love that space. But I think we're also growing into new spaces, new construction, home building. Huge space for us right now.

Seeing a lot of growth there as far as, you know, avoiding larger services and these home builders really seeing the value in that. I think obviously we're going towards the utility side, too.

Mark Rabin

00:23:58.730 - 00:24:00.410

Hopefully the utilities see the value in that.

Troy Daniels

00:24:00.410 - 00:25:29.960

Utilities are, see, and, you know, it's an easy conversation. I find that utilities really see that value and, and it makes sense to them. So they're already seeing that.

When we can save them money, you know, we're, we're going to see a lot of growth with our great partners. You know, we're here at Landis and Boots Gear as one of our biggest partners. They are tenured in the industry.

They know a lot of people, and it's exciting to see the growth in the partnerships.

I think we're going to have a, a lot of exciting partnerships you're going to see throughout the year that will continue to grow the business and kind of bring Span to its full potential as a product. And it's still early days, too, so it's like, yeah, the technology's there. Yeah.

Now the adoption is coming and it's really exciting.

I think we're going to see just a ton of use cases, especially in the utility space, when they're pulling so much data and using it for such advanced situations where they can implement different programs and save a lot of money on infrastructure and, and hopefully really provide control to the customer as well. All right, love it. Where can people find out more about span?

You can check out our website, SPAN IO. Feel free to contact us there as well. Any questions, purchases, technical questions. We actually even have A SPAN tech portal.

If you're an installer, it's got a suite of videos. They're great training resources. Yeah, Tons of info up there. All right, thanks, Troy. Thank you.

Hal Corin

00:25:31.640 - 00:26:39.540

Hi, I'm Hal Koren, head of development at Veridi, where I focus on strategy, new markets, customer journey, and I run our IoT grid communications division.

Veridi is special because we figured out a way to make batteries with high density safe to go in and around buildings by solving for propagation of thermal runaway. Thermal runaway is a short circuit that occurs in battery chemistries that are energy dense, which makes them really dangerous.

It's a statistical inevitability even with the best cells in the world.

And so by coming up with this architecture that can stop that, you end up being able to make batteries go where they never have before, where they are most relevant to grid and can monetize and kind of solve all the problems and challenges within energy transition, lower costs for users, utilities defer infrastructure upgrades and have an opportunity to create equity in the system, even things like firming renewables and making solar more valuable. So it's an exciting time to be at Veridian, to be doing what we're doing as a domestic manufacturer of battery storage.

Mark Rabin

00:26:39.620 - 00:26:57.000

Yeah, you guys are making some pretty big waves here in the last number of years, as we can see here. Right here, we've got your mobile unit. Did you guys start off in mobile

power or was it the inverse? Because I know that you guys have some. You'll tell us about your batteries that are in for buildings.

Hal Corin

00:26:57.000 - 00:27:12.000

Yeah, interestingly, we started off by electrifying heavy equipment, like think, you know, small excavators and even big excavators. But, you know, got into mobile equipment early and saw a lot of advantages and market capability there.

Mark Rabin

00:27:12.080 - 00:27:18.800

Yeah, but also that requires a certain level of safety and certification that you otherwise wouldn't necessarily need.

Hal Corin

00:27:19.200 - 00:27:33.220

Yeah, absolutely. If you're going to be in and around crowds of people and equipment, safety is of the utmost.

In addition, of course, to what the use case is and how you're driving benefit for the buyer and the customer.

Mark Rabin

00:27:33.460 - 00:27:49.060

Right. And so you guys have been expanding. So we all know the moxion story, and if you don't know, folks, go check it out.

But yeah, so you guys picked up some of their assets, IP and also their manufacturing facility.

Hal Corin

00:27:49.380 - 00:28:14.720

Yeah, yeah. So we have a portion of their facility in Richmond, which is right off of the port. It's an awesome place.

And it's a parallel because that was the old Ford plant, which was actually where Rosie the Riveter worked. And our headquarters in Buffalo, New York, is an old GM facility.

So we're keeping it in the theme of reinvesting in American infrastructure and revitalizing neighborhoods, which is a privilege.

Mark Rabin

00:28:14.880 - 00:28:24.290

I love that. So before we jump onto something else here, you just showed me a photo of your sort of in, like, confined spaces in building system.

Hal Corin

00:28:24.370 - 00:28:24.930

Yep.

Mark Rabin

00:28:24.930 - 00:28:25.810

Tell us about that.

Brad Johnson

00:28:25.810 - 00:28:26.170

What's.

Mark Rabin

00:28:26.170 - 00:28:31.170

What's special about that? Because you can't just throw any old battery pack inside a building.

Hal Corin

00:28:31.330 - 00:29:11.820

Yeah, that's correct. In fact, it's rare to see one over 20 kilowatt hours inside a building. And so that system was 3.75 megawatt hours.

So 75 of these packs that you see next to me spread around the basement of a multifamily building.

And so the purpose of that facility was really to be grid interactive and to control dispatch, to meet grid need when it's there, and also to provide resiliency for. For the owner and occupants of that building. So, you know, they.

They can drive a lot of revenue and in addition, tell a really great sustainability story and lower cost to. To their residents, which is great.

Mark Rabin

00:29:12.140 - 00:29:31.430

Now, remember, many, many years ago, there's a company called, like, Advanced Microgrid Solutions or something like that. Anyways, they were. They had a model where they're going inside buildings and so on, but it

never really went anywhere there too early. Yeah, but it sounds like now's the time. I mean, you're able to do it safely. And there's the. Now the incentive models.

Hal Corin

00:29:31.590 - 00:30:07.580

Yes, right. Yeah.

I would say there's sort of this angle of customer and market readiness, which certainly includes, you know, authorities having jurisdiction and fire departments, you know, but all of those groups are right to be scared about what the dangers of batteries present. But, you know, our technology is in the right place.

And for all of the challenges that we're looking into with grid modernization, growth, electrification, AI data center booming, like, you know, people really understand now that batteries are the Rosetta stone of how you solve for all of these challenges. Yeah.

Mark Rabin

00:30:07.960 - 00:30:19.880

So, yeah, good segue. So we are at a grid power show. Lots of talk. I mean, 100 years of stable and, you know, keep the lights on. Don't mess with the system.

Hal Corin

00:30:20.120 - 00:30:20.680

Yeah.

Mark Rabin

00:30:20.680 - 00:30:22.280

Everything's up in the air right now.

Hal Corin

00:30:22.280 - 00:30:22.760

Yeah.

Mark Rabin

00:30:23.320 - 00:30:34.740

You're here at the show. There aren't that many battery folks here at the show. Yeah. How are you interacting with the grid? You know, and what does that take?

Because that's a different. That's a different game than just pulling a battery.

Hal Corin

00:30:34.740 - 00:32:28.160

Around. Yeah. What's really important for us, and I mean, I would say for anybody, is future proofing and kind of being ready.

And so for us, that means having a very modular build. You know, an owner is not going to want to overextend, especially on capital expenditure.

So buy batteries you need today and you can foresee a return on and get more later if you need more.

In terms of, you know, grid interactivity and sort of the value streams that we monetize, you know, what I can say confidently is that in five years, rates and tariffs are going to look a lot different. Streams to monetize are also going to look a lot different.

These things are really growing in ways that will be largely influenced by types of load in areas, types of generation in areas, and infrastructure challenges that are local. And so the shape of electrification of heat and electrification of transport will have huge impacts on this as they. As they differ.

And so in that sense, you know, our trick on interacting with grids is really boiling everything down to math. Right. It's just algorithms.

And for any customer, they're solving for a known amount of things, whether those are revenue streams, peak shaving, time of use, arbitrage, demand response, frequency regulation, all these different things and more.

But, you know, things like optimizing solar fit in there, sustainability, whatever that might mean to the owner, or resiliency, whatever that definition might mean for the owner, these are all things that are in a value stack of what you would do with a battery if you have it.

And so if you're scheduling that with the right intelligence and you know what to optimize and what's important to your customer, you know, that's where you need to come ready to play. And so for us, you know, we're not taking our foot off the gas pedal.

You really need to be ready to evolve with the customer and the rates and the challenges and opportunities that present themselves.

Mark Rabin

00:32:28.560 - 00:32:42.400

And I mean, but you guys made your name with. I could see the sun belt logo on the unit. Yeah, I see your units all over at Burning man, and also they're being paired with diesel generators.

So you're hybridizing a lot.

Hal Corin

00:32:42.400 - 00:32:43.480

Absolutely, yeah.

Mark Rabin

00:32:43.480 - 00:32:53.520

How important is that market right now to you? Because it's. We've all been in that market for a long time, but it seems like it's just kicking off now.

If you were like, oh, I compare this with a diesel generator.

Hal Corin

00:32:53.520 - 00:32:53.980

Yeah.

Mark Rabin

00:32:54.690 - 00:32:55.250

So, yeah.

Hal Corin

00:32:55.250 - 00:32:55.610

Where.

Mark Rabin

00:32:55.610 - 00:32:57.850

Tell us a little bit about where you guys are at with that market there.

Hal Corin

00:32:57.850 - 00:35:05.839

You know, it's. It's a phenomenal Market and Sunbelt is, is a great customer. They take us plenty of places.

And in terms of kind of earning our gray hairs and stripes for our product and really like testing them to the nth degree, we've been in the great north in Canada, and we've been, you know, in extended deployments in deserts in the southwest. And so very relevant because for all the things we just spoke of, you know, grid transition and evolution, the grid's becoming less reliable.

And so folks are becoming more dependent and interested in micro grids while also, you know, looking at the stacking up operational costs of operating in periods of significant grid grade increases. So folks are looking how to save money and become more resilient and independent from grids.

And so in that way, a facility that has diesel generator or, you know, you would be considering remote operations. Battery only makes sense, right? So just like any combustion engine, it likes to run at 100%. That's where it's most efficient.

And so the trick is by hybridizing the system, doing a generator plus a battery, or groups of generators plus groups of batteries, you always utilize them when they're most efficient. You get the best gas mileage, but what that translates to, you know, better savings, quieter run times, less runtime on the diesel.

It only runs when it's most happy. So you extend the life of that equipment, you decrease the cost to maintain it.

And you know, beyond that, what our systems bring to sort of dumb diesel systems or other systems use remotely are communications. Gives us the ability to control it remotely, visualize it.

And we've done this on some pretty like basic, old, old equipment and so sort of giving folks the ability to see what's happening and create a triage plan if they're solving for, you know, a disaster or some kind of, you know, uptime goals. It's important.

Mark Rabin

00:35:05.919 - 00:35:14.450

And I mean, construction seems to be a no brainer as well. I mean, literally diesel generators running with no load on them on construction sites all over North America.

Hal Corin

00:35:14.450 - 00:35:21.890

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, you know, charge up the battery, run it wildly, and don't piss off your neighbors. It's a good combination.

Mark Rabin

00:35:22.210 - 00:35:27.730

Yeah, I love it. Is there anything we should know about IAF going forward? What do you guys got planned for 2026?

Hal Corin

00:35:27.810 - 00:35:53.730

You know, we were, we ended 25 with a few big bangs. We've got a lot of products shipping out to some key sites, you know, Fortune 100.

We're looking to do a lot more indoors and you know, really double down on being an American based manufacturer still eligible for ITC. And at 40%. So excited about a lot of partnerships that we have going. And yeah, please stay tuned.

Mark Rabin

00:35:54.210 - 00:35:58.530

Love that. And where can folks find out about Veriti?

Hal Corin

00:35:58.770 - 00:36:16.630

So check out our website, veridiparente.com please feel free to get in touch with me or here at the conference. We're here with Mark Hagedorn. We're here with Mohamed Hoda. And, you know, find any of us on LinkedIn, please follow us on LinkedIn and get in touch.

Zena Harris

00:36:18.390 - 00:36:29.970

Our designer is Aaliyah Kane. Music is by Peter Chapman. Social media is by Sharon Yuen. Our editor and producer is Rachel Werbell.

Zena

00:00:14.160 - 00:00:16.000

And Mark is coming to us from......

Mark

00:00:17.760 - 00:01:36.120

San Diego airport. I was just at Distributech and.

Which is like a crazy grid power conference and exhibition and you know, trade show and meeting of the minds and yeah, it's, it's. It was actually very humbling to be honest.

You know, I just, when I thought like, you know, I know a lot about energy and I'm just, this is my jam and you know, I'm going through the world as a unique energy nerd. You go to a conference like this that has 20,000 people really like deeply technically nerding out on grid technology.

And it's a crazy time for the grid, right, because of the, all the talk around data centers and you know, like the, the breaking of the grid and everybody's been, you know, privy to a blackout or a brownout or curtailment. Right.

Where you get a text message saying like hey, you know, so you can hear that the airport, it's like, it's like hey, turn your air conditioning down or hey, turn your, turn your EV charging off because you're going to get charged. So. Yeah, yeah.

Zena

00:01:36.120 - 00:02:13.690

Anyway, yeah, it's this thing that for a lot of just you know, normal people who you know, are, have work in other industries or whatever, we don't really see or interact with. We, we just plug. You know, it's very passive. Right.

But when you the curtain back and you really step into it, like you have, it's really eye openening. I find that stuff fascinating even though I personally don't know it. You know, I a ton about it. I know like just a slice.

But being immersed in situations like that where you've got all of these experts all around, doesn't that just like make your brain tingle?

Speaker A

00:02:14.490 - 00:02:58.420

Yeah, well, it actually made me like a little bit scared too because I was like, oh, you know, I'm, I'm exploring my next business opportunities and ventures and you know, and I, one of them was like, oh, maybe, you know, maybe go get into some grid technology manufacturing or something like that. And I was like, like, oh, like, like this is a big game. And you know, like it's even the small companies, you know, they're building big things.

Yeah, so. So yeah, it's just, I mean it's just there's so much huge technology because you can't software your way out of the power grid.

Zena

00:02:58.740 - 00:02:59.060

Right.

Speaker A

00:02:59.060 - 00:03:18.080

You know what I mean? Like, it's like we, we, we get all wrapped up in ChatGPT and AI and software and our computers and we sit all day and.

But all of this is there's a backbone of just like copper cables, you know, substations, huge transformers, and the infrastructure.

Zena

00:03:18.640 - 00:03:24.800

That we drive by on highways and we don't even notice. Right. It's stuff like that. Yeah.

Speaker A

00:03:25.040 - 00:03:32.880

Yeah. Well, we only notice when, when it's out, when the car's out. And then we complain that it's out for like a few hours or a day.

Zena

00:03:33.120 - 00:03:34.720

I know. Yeah.

Speaker A

00:03:34.720 - 00:03:35.040

Right?

Zena

00:03:35.440 - 00:03:39.200

Yeah. 100. Okay. So I'm gonna pick up on one thing you said.

Speaker A

00:03:39.780 - 00:03:40.100

Yeah.

Zena

00:03:41.380 - 00:03:50.580

You're considering, you know, like starting, you know, another business or something, and I'm just want to like, double click on that. Look. You've started a business before.

Speaker A

00:03:51.460 - 00:03:52.020

Yep.

Zena

00:03:53.380 - 00:04:04.340

Multiple. Okay, so you're pro. I, you know, I also started a company and some or, you know, organizations in the last, you know, a few, you know, couple.

Speaker A

00:04:04.740 - 00:04:05.460

I don't know. Yeah.

Zena

00:04:05.460 - 00:04:06.740

You've 12 years. Whatever.

Speaker A

00:04:06.740 - 00:04:10.780

A bunch, A bunch of societies and organizations as well. Yeah.

Zena

00:04:11.020 - 00:04:36.220

So I'm curious, just as you're thinking through this again, in this time of your life, like, what's different for you? Like, what. How are you thinking of this differently? I. I'm.

I'm so curious because it's part of like, you know, the evolution of like, you learn, you iterate, you fail, you, you know, iterate. You know what I mean? Like, but what's. How are you thinking of it this time around?

Speaker A

00:04:37.220 - 00:04:37.860

Oh, wow.

Zena

00:04:39.540 - 00:04:40.980

Not to put you on the spot.

Speaker A

00:04:41.140 - 00:05:54.970

Early morning question as I am at the airport here now. Wow, there's so many angles. Actually. Yeah, good question. I guess the first one is just like, you know, I feel like I'm just getting better.

I mean, so I did an MBA in 2013 and like two businesses later, I feel like I actually have like multiple MBAs now. Or, you know, like, I, I have like the, the deep, deep learnings.

Because you only learn by doing and by sitting at the table and by, you know, getting punched in the face a bunch of times. Yeah. You know, the other thing too is just a greater self awareness. We've talked about it on the podcast, of course, and. Right. It's.

It's, you know, a lot of times we walk through life or we don't react. React in a way that we were not aware because it's just an automatic reaction and then that causes a chain reaction with the other folks in the room.

And I think that that's been a big one for me.

You know, I've done a tremendous amount of like, personal development and therapy and coaching and like, really looking at my patterns and understanding that. So I'd say that's, that's a big one, you know, but also like this, the network, right?

Zena

00:05:55.250 - 00:05:55.530

Yeah.

Speaker A

00:05:55.530 - 00:06:21.690

They getting out there and proving by, by doing again, right? It's, it's all of these, you know, it's not fake stuff, right? You, you can't do that. You know that you can't. Again, there's no.

There, there are, there are charlatans out there that, that do go through these exercises of creating businesses or ideas and then, you know, everybody's had those stories, right, of, you know, where they take the money and they leave or they, they, it's not a real business or.

Zena

00:06:21.690 - 00:06:31.870

Whatever, or like wild, you know, investment. And you're like, wow. And then you. Yeah, we work and then it fails, you know, so.

Speaker A

00:06:32.590 - 00:07:20.310

Right. So I think that that's been a big part of it. It's just like learning the skills to get out there and to do it again.

Now the question is, is do I have the emotional and physical and financial bandwidth right. To do it again or like, does that.

So it's more about, I think it's more about the path of like, okay, is the opportunity good enough that I'm going to put the next five to ten years of my life on, right? And that's, and that's kind of the issue.

Or do I join a really amazing team, right, that's already in flow and jump on and then lead that, lead to that instead of being the one who's like, this is my idea. This is what we're going to do, right?

Zena

00:07:20.870 - 00:08:09.010

Yeah, yeah, totally.

I think there is, you know, the awareness of what is, you know, an entrepreneurial mindset and skill set versus, you know, then acting on those and starting, literally starting a business, starting a legal entity and taking your idea forward because you can have those mindsets and skill sets within another organization and really, you know, leverage those to make that organization even better as well. Your team better, all of that.

And I think that's a, that's a good distinction because just because you have those kinds of, you know, skills and tendencies and you know, the initiative and drive, you know, does it mean you have to start a company yourself?

Speaker A

00:08:09.810 - 00:08:30.650

Exactly. And if I think it's the startup fallacy that I, that I refer to quite a bit, right. It's every.

There's this cultural thing, especially here in North America. It's like, well, everybody's an entrepreneur. Everybody can go and do it. It's easy to do it, right?

It's easy to raise your first 50,000 bucks or get you some friends and family or Everybody's like, yeah, you go do it.

Zena

00:08:30.809 - 00:08:31.249

Yeah.

Speaker A

00:08:31.249 - 00:09:09.490

But. But what you don't see is the trail of. Of broken dreams. Finances, families, bank accounts that are. That are done. Like, you just.

There's so many entrepreneurs and people that have, like, literally put it all on the line and then lost it all because, you know, they were told they could do one thing, and then by the time they got through it or to midpoint, right, it's hard. It's freaking hard. And there's no money, and people are like, well, sorry. Sorry, bud. Yeah, like. Like, good try.

And you're like, but it's still happening. It's still going. We. This is like, I just need some support. I need some coaching. I need some mentorship. I need money and, you know, whatever it is.

Zena

00:09:09.570 - 00:10:20.790

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%.

I mean, honestly, like, I think in my experience, like, you know, entrepreneurship, actually, you know, I'd worked at big companies before starting a business of my own, and it is one of the, like, it is the hardest thing I've done. Like, you know, it is, like you said, it strains people in ways beyond just the business component.

You know, the family dynamic, the, you know, you know, caring for your people and employees and, you know, these sorts of things.

Like, this is an additional, like, thing to think about in a different way than you would have at an organization where you are a part of a larger, you know, team and infrastructure and all of this, you know, financially, right.

Thinking about, you know, how you're approaching the business, how you want to, you know, keep costs down but do quality work and how do you invest in overhead functions that, you know, are taking away from, you know, other things, like, you know what I mean? Like, this is.

Speaker A

00:10:20.790 - 00:10:27.550

This is. Then they still have your physical, Physical, emotional and mental health on top of that.

Zena

00:10:27.710 - 00:11:03.270

On top of that. Exactly. And I know you and I have talked about things like that over the years where it's like, how are you dealing with this?

How are you, you know, thinking about this?

And this is what I've learned so much from you and your most recent, you know, last couple years, like, your journey of self, you know, looking inward, self improvement, you know, all of these things that you're. You're really taking care of yourself. I.

It's really caused me to, you know, like, pick up and think about what I'm doing, you know, So I. I do appreciate that. Thank you for modeling.

Speaker A

00:11:03.990 - 00:11:40.430

Thank you. But. But, you know, it's interesting is to come to these kind of conferences and as well as I was at the Clean Tech Forum last week.

So I'm kind of on the, the February, you know, conference run.

But it's that there's, but there are so many amazing entrepreneurs with stories and they've done it multiple times and you know, like it doesn't get easier necessarily, but it definitely, you learn the tricks of the trade and I think that's, that's the part that, that's super important. Right. Your first one may not succeed, but you know, your second one might. And if your second one might not, then your third one might.

Zena

00:11:40.990 - 00:11:41.470

Yeah.

Speaker A

00:11:41.470 - 00:11:56.190

Question is, is back to your point about getting just a job? I mean maybe sometimes it's just like, I mean I know my close friends and family are like, just get a job.

Stock with stock options that just like go up in price.

Zena

00:11:57.720 - 00:12:03.280

I mean this is the stuff that sounds good just when you say it. But it's, you know, there's more to.

Speaker A

00:12:03.280 - 00:12:06.520

It than just a good job. Just get a real job. Yeah. What?

Zena

00:12:06.920 - 00:12:08.160

Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker A

00:12:08.160 - 00:12:09.720

I've only had a real job once.

Zena

00:12:10.840 - 00:12:21.640

I, I had a, like, I don't. Okay, real job. I'm gonna take issue with that one. But just like I've had the kind of traditional like corporate job. I've, I've had that. Right?

Speaker A

00:12:21.640 - 00:12:22.920

Yeah, so I've had that once.

Zena

00:12:24.290 - 00:12:26.850

So. I mean I did too.

Speaker A

00:12:27.010 - 00:12:28.450

I did once or five years.

Zena

00:12:28.530 - 00:13:19.510

I think about it a lot though. I do. I'm like wonder what it would be like. I wonder how I would, you know, you know, be excited in a. And you know, in a situation like that.

Sometimes it's a tree. Intriguing. I'm not gonna lie. And then you know, like.

But it's, it's interesting because sometimes I think in that scenario would I be able to do the things that I can do kind of, you know, having my own company autonomy, ability to, you know, speak when I want to speak and you know, do, do these kind do things that you know, might be constrained in other corporate scenarios? I, I don't know the answer, but I'm curious about it.

Speaker A

00:13:20.070 - 00:13:42.550

I, I think a lot about it too and I think that there's a lot more open mindedness now in organizations especially the Intrapreneur, you know, that, that mindset or there's a lot of corporate innovation arms. Right. As well now that, that, that either take new tech and bring it in or take tech and spin it out.

Zena

00:13:43.340 - 00:13:43.540

Yeah.

Speaker A

00:13:43.540 - 00:14:02.380

Right. So I, I do think there are examples of, of that, you know, in entertainment. We're seeing it now too. Right. Like companies like Netflix for example.

Right. They're, they're being pushed to be super creative and supporting all types of initiatives. Right.

Like there was that Rocky Mountain Institute initiative.

Zena

00:14:02.860 - 00:14:05.740

Oh, the Clean Power initiative.

Speaker A

00:14:05.980 - 00:14:07.580

Yeah, something like that. Where.

Zena

00:14:09.670 - 00:14:10.830

Collaboration. Which.

Speaker A

00:14:10.830 - 00:14:12.630

Yeah, and Rocky Mountain Institute.

Zena

00:14:12.950 - 00:14:13.430

Yeah.

Speaker A

00:14:13.510 - 00:15:02.130

You know, like there's like, like those are big corporations that are trying to, you know, figure out how to be more nimble. And so I don't know, I, I think, I think we're seeing a lot of that, you know, even here at this, this like huge show Distributech.

The industry, the, the utility industry has been around for over 100 years and it's been very, very, very, very conservative. It's a very conservative industry. But they're now being forced to change and evolve and, and break things and grow.

And you know, the data center thing and the power needs are just all pushing the limits. And I'm actually, I got, I did about four interviews here on the floor. So this will be fun to hear from them.

A little bit different, but it'll be fun to hear from them. So.

Zena

00:15:02.130 - 00:15:03.490

Good little teaser for.

Speaker A

00:15:03.650 - 00:15:04.210

Yeah.

Zena

00:15:05.090 - 00:15:08.130

For the next, next episode, I guess.

Speaker A

00:15:08.610 - 00:15:09.090

Yeah.

Zena

00:15:09.810 - 00:16:13.910

No, that's interesting. That's interesting. That is.

Okay, so you're, you're making me think like, you know, we have said, and I think we, you know, can agree, like the film and TV industry has also been conservative in a lot of ways with, you know, how they've approached filmmaking and you know, speaking out, gatekeeping, you know, in certain ways controlling the narrative. You know, like there's a lot of, of, you know, conservative elements in that.

And, and if we look to other industries for examples, maybe, you know, utilities is, is a while an odd, you know, maybe model to look to just in the sense of how they're shifting their approach in being more innovative and creative from a more conservative approach to a more what, what would you call it? More innovative, nimble approach.

Speaker A

00:16:14.870 - 00:17:59.830

Yeah, I mean, I think. Yeah. I mean it's so funny though for such a liberal type of industry, right. The film industry, for how conservative it actually is or kg.

But for example, I mean you've got folks like director Brent Hodge, right. Which we've got to get him on here again. I don't know. Have we ever had him on here? No, not on, no, it was, it was, it was on Real Green.

All right, yeah, let's. Yeah, we gotta get him. But like, for example, he, you know, he, he had an Adam Pauley documentary which is really funny in hbo and he, they did it.

It was like a one day like production and it was really, really Creative. And he captured Adam Pauley doing his stand up routine. And then they did the whole thing, packaged it up, and HBO was like, yeah, we'll take it.

And that's very unique because usually, usually they want to have their say in it and then you pitch the idea and then you go and you do it. Right. So even that there's a shift is innovative. And they're like, yep. Because they're like, talent, young talent, let's go.

Right, So I think we're seeing it at the end of the day though, good shit still floats to the top and. Right.

And so I think that that's the other thing too is we've just created so much garbage out there that, that people are still yearning for a good, real connection to, you know, a human connection. And that will speak louder than some corporate nonsense. At least that's my take on it.

Zena

00:17:59.990 - 00:18:25.450

Yeah, good point, good point.

Well, I mean, I guess interesting to, you know, keep tabs on, you know, what's going on in other industries and also, like, find those innovators within, you know, entertainment as well as we've been trying to do. I think, you know, in the course of this little podcast project. But, you know, I'm going to reach.

Speaker A

00:18:25.450 - 00:18:27.250

Out to Haji right after this.

Zena

00:18:27.410 - 00:19:11.830

Yeah, do that, do that. That would be cool.

But I think, you know, also the point is that at least some takeaways for me just in this little conversation is, you know, it's, it's a lot about awareness, self awareness, emotional awareness, you know, in how people, how, how you're working, whether it's, you know, an entrepreneurial setting or within a larger company, there's a lot of that. It's probably the core piece of all of this.

And interestingly for you, as you're kind of thinking through your next moves, you know, and how that looks in terms of, you know, your entrepreneurial journey.

Speaker A

00:19:14.630 - 00:19:46.700

Yeah, it's, it's humbling.

Like, I'll say, like, I feel, you know, I don't know, you probably feel the same way, but it's like, I just feel really, really lucky to be able to have the resources and the health and the time to do this. Right? To do this. Because it's not everybody to, to, to do the entrepreneurial journey and to do this stuff, it's not everybody that can do this.

Like, you know, if you had to like, just barely, barely scrape by and try to like, you know, just keep things from falling all apart, like, you're not gonna go out and start Green Spark Group.

Zena

00:19:47.020 - 00:19:47.900

Yeah, right.

Speaker A

00:19:47.980 - 00:20:44.660

I mean, you've got incredible family supporting this and supporting you and. Right. What? For better, for worse. And then it's like. Right. But you know, that's, it's not possible.

Like, I was talking to a longtime entrepreneur last night at, at a networking event and we were talking about this actually, and he said, you know, it was, it was his, his partner, his wife who had to always remind him to come back to the family, you know, because again, he gets so wrapped up in your work and he's like, like, she saved like their, their, their, their family basically, because she always was like, you need to get back here now and drop all that shit. And, you know, there's a family right now. These kids are always grown up and so on. They're still, still together.

But I thought that was a really interesting thing. Right. It's like, it's a good reminder, like, there was a. Yeah. I mean, can doing entrepreneurship can be toxic for your life?

Zena

00:20:45.300 - 00:20:52.260

It is such. Yes. You know what? Like, I mean, hits home a lot. I mean, you met my husband.

Speaker A

00:20:52.420 - 00:20:52.900

Yeah.

Zena

00:20:52.900 - 00:21:00.180

And you know, he is solid. Solid and has.

Speaker A

00:21:00.180 - 00:21:01.780

Yeah. Rich. Yeah.

Zena

00:21:01.780 - 00:21:13.980

Super supportive and, and these sorts of things.

But I'm not gonna lie, it has been stressful at times and he's been, you know, he's reminded me of like, you know, let's, you know, what are you doing?

Speaker A

00:21:14.380 - 00:21:16.380

Let's think about this. Stop working.

Zena

00:21:16.620 - 00:21:58.750

Yeah, I know, I know. And like traveling and stuff.

Like, you know, this is where like, you know, for, you know, leaders of companies, founders, you know, you gotta be, you know, put yourself out there. Right. You, you have to network a lot too. You have to, you know, be available and things like this.

And, and it does take a toll and we have to be mindful. And so anyway, I get a reminder of that and I appreciate it too, because you're right. We can get wrapped up in, in work and whatnot. So anyway.

Speaker A

00:21:58.910 - 00:22:15.870

Yeah, well. And here we are. Yeah, good chat. I mean, this is, this is just something.

This is something that's just something we, you know, I'm glad we got to do this and yeah, we'll do a little bit more. Just chatting about different topics and different things. Right. Just.

Zena

00:22:17.870 - 00:22:21.390

Interesting, though, to hear a bit about your conferencing as well. So.

Speaker A

00:22:21.750 - 00:22:29.350

Yeah, well, I'm out there. I am out there. I believe in rock and roll and it's going to happen. The universe is working in my favor.

Zena

00:22:29.590 - 00:22:36.390

Yeah. Yeah. Well, good for you. Good for you. Thanks for the chat and we'll catch up.

on text goes here

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:00:00.160 - 00:00:07.600

And this year we have five dragon wings and we're powering four major camps. 330 people and we've been running on renewables.

Ben Seiger

00:00:09.840 - 00:00:12.480

Hi, this is Zena Harris and I'm Mark Rabin.

Solarpunks

00:00:12.880 - 00:00:14.240

Welcome to the tie in.

Mark Rabin

00:00:14.720 - 00:02:54.190

Hey everyone. And welcome to the tie in. This is a special edition, Burning Man 2025. This is kind of a continuation from my Burning Man 2024 edition that I did.

And just having a lot of fun being out there, hanging out with friends and also just meeting the coolest innovators with the best technology out there, really trying and pushing the limits of what's possible in the harshest environment.

This is also an addition of our sort of from the field segments which we go out behind the scenes and really nerd out with the doers that are making real change happen in the field and again, pushing the limits of what's possible. And I feel so blessed to be able to call many of these folks my dear friends and to be alongside them on this incredible journey.

So this episode is really the culmination of years of work that you'll see and you'll hear from our incredible guests. This is not a pop up, it's not an accident.

These folks are incredibly talented and are working around the clock to bring their innovations to the Playa. And we all know that the Playa is truly one of the most inhospitable environments, not just the heat.

This year there was rain and wind and folks had to build and rebuild their camps and Burning man was late to start. I heard something really great.

It was like the longest burn and the shortest burn all in one because everybody came set up and then the wind and the rain came and blew everything down. Some folks didn't recover. I was driving in at one point and I saw folks driving out fully packed up and this was just like Sunday. So interesting.

Never a dull moment out there. Also one of the greatest proving grounds for solar and battery technology.

So we're going to start here with an interview with a gentleman who Jimmy rigged a cybertruck with solar shade and batteries to power his camp. And we'll start with that and then we'll come back after that interview and introduce the rest of the interviews.

I was just biking by, visiting a friend's camp at hair salon.

Ben Seiger

00:02:54.509 - 00:02:55.270

Yes they did.

Mark Rabin

00:02:55.270 - 00:03:06.420

And someone pointed out this amazing looking integrated contraption with Tesla cybertruck and also solar shade structure.

Ben Seiger

00:03:06.580 - 00:03:07.100

Indeed.

Mark Rabin

00:03:07.100 - 00:03:08.060

Who am I talking to?

Ben Sieger

00:03:08.060 - 00:03:17.940

Ben Seiger. We're a small startup, Halo Hybrid Solutions. We're an electrical contractor but we have a Technology focus.

So CS major, just happened to be an electrician going through college 20 years ago. Right.

Mark Rabin

00:03:18.020 - 00:03:18.740

I love it.

Ben Sieger

00:03:18.980 - 00:03:35.980

So ended up having. Last year we came out, we actually towed our 30 foot RV with the Cybertruck.

But the challenge we had is you had to stop every about 100 miles and you. So it just took a lot of effort. So did it charged on solar and did a reverse course with about 600 miles from salt Lake City.

Ben Seiger

00:03:35.980 - 00:03:36.300

Right.

Ben Sieger

00:03:36.380 - 00:03:49.500

This year we decided rather than going that route, we did just tow with our F150. But we still wanted the Cybertruck. But we're using it what Tesla calls their power share capability. So this is vehicle to home.

So what we have is if you

Mark Rabin

00:03:49.500 - 00:03:56.220

come all the way this way, V2X, H, G, whatever.

Ben Sieger

00:03:56.220 - 00:04:07.800

Exactly. So this is the V2H capability specifically. So you've got the Tesla gateway at as well as their Gen 3 wall connector.

This is just in layman's terms, it's an automatic transfer switch with a microgrid controller.

Mark Rabin

00:04:07.800 - 00:04:08.240

Yeah.

Ben Sieger

00:04:08.240 - 00:04:15.600

So all of this is what would be considered AC coupled. The challenge you've got is the Cybertruck does not have any way of taking solar as an input.

Mark Rabin

00:04:15.600 - 00:04:15.840

Right.

Ben Sieger

00:04:15.840 - 00:04:17.200

If we go back the other direction.

Mark Rabin

00:04:17.360 - 00:04:25.320

Right, right. So you need to somehow invert the DC to AC from the solar array and put it into your panel area there.

Ben Sieger

00:04:25.320 - 00:05:18.870

We do indeed. So my prior role I was rep for Schneider Electric for the West. And so with that, one of my peers at Schneider actually is a startup CEO as well.

This is Rion r e o n. They have a hybrid inverter that's just their mobile power station. So what this IS is a 7.5kW hybrid inverter with 10kWh of battery energy storage in the bottom of it. Nice commercial spec gear.

What this allows us to do is we have two solar arrays. The one that gets all the attention is the one on the back of the cyberspace. This is just a bifacial.

It's about 3.8 kilowatts on just a ground mount array that we just happen to line up to the vehicle bolts on top. That's another 5 kilowatts of flexible solar panels. Those are what you would use for a marine environment.

So both of these come back together into this hybrid inverter and then we charge back over to the Tesla gateway.

Mark Rabin

00:05:18.870 - 00:05:28.360

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's so cool. I just think, think that like eventually every solar, every shade structure becomes its own power plant. Yes, it has to.

Ben Sieger

00:05:28.760 - 00:05:37.960

The big challenge we have is the physical weight and so for us, it's, yes, we take this. It definitely helps in the morning and the afternoon. But the flexible solar panels are significantly lighter.

Mark Rabin

00:05:37.960 - 00:05:38.280

Yeah.

Ben Sieger

00:05:38.280 - 00:05:45.320

So that's the combination. They're 500 watts a piece. The challenge is cost.

Mark Rabin

00:05:46.520 - 00:05:47.720

Are they Merlin Solar?

Ben Sieger

00:05:48.450 - 00:05:49.730

They're not. They're a Chinese spec.

Mark Rabin

00:05:49.730 - 00:05:50.730

Okay. So there's.

Ben Sieger

00:05:50.730 - 00:05:59.330

So I don't remember the exact better price though. Exactly. But still they're. They're $5,000 worth of flexible solar panels because of the. The way their backing works.

Mark Rabin

00:05:59.410 - 00:05:59.890

Yeah.

Ben Sieger

00:05:59.890 - 00:06:29.840

But overall, so essentially what happens is during the day we charge the Cybertruck. And then at night, right, as that hybrid inverter runs out of battery, it automatically transfers over.

So you have a very momentary blip, less than a second, and the entire camp then runs off the Cybertruck for the duration of the evening. And then the next day we charge it back up again. So The Cybertruck has 123 kilowatt hours of energy storage capability.

By comparison, there's 10 kilowatt hours in that mobile power station.

Mark Rabin

00:06:29.840 - 00:06:32.440

But how much power can that deliver? Do you.

Ben Sieger

00:06:32.440 - 00:06:33.640

11.5 kilowatts.

Mark Rabin

00:06:33.960 - 00:06:36.880

Okay, so is there an inverter on board? That's how you're doing that.

Ben Sieger

00:06:36.880 - 00:06:47.340

Right. So what happens is a lot of people look at electric vehicles, hey, I've got an at home charger or supercharger. That's a little bit of a misnomer.

The charger is actually on the vehicle itself.

Mark Rabin

00:06:47.340 - 00:06:47.740

Right.

Ben Sieger

00:06:47.980 - 00:07:00.780

And so what you have is you have a wall connector that has just a 60amp breaker that allows us to distribute power out to everything in the camp. But then the actual inverters on board, same thing with you do a supercharger. That's a DC connection.

Mark Rabin

00:07:00.860 - 00:07:01.340

Yes.

Ben Sieger

00:07:01.340 - 00:07:12.910

What we did last year is we had all of the power was all a DC power distribution called what is called Class 2 power distribution. But we had to do a different architecture this year to bring the cybertruck into play.

Mark Rabin

00:07:12.910 - 00:07:13.350

Right, Right.

Ben Sieger

00:07:13.350 - 00:07:16.150

So it's kind of play. You did it different last year. This year it's kind of expensive.

Mark Rabin

00:07:16.150 - 00:07:23.950

I mean, this is the beautiful thing about Burning man. Right? I mean, exactly. This is a playground for this thing. All the innovators are here. I mean, this is what gets me jazzed about all this stuff.

Ben Sieger

00:07:23.950 - 00:07:27.710

Right. Try something new. Play around. Break it. Fix it. Break it again. Fix it again.

Mark Rabin

00:07:27.710 - 00:07:31.750

It's like, all right. Exactly. And if it works here, it's gonna work somewhere else.

Ben Sieger

00:07:31.750 - 00:07:35.470

Exactly. Because there's nothing like having a nice weather event come in when you're Setting up, it's like, all right, if I can figure this out in that environment, what can I take back to the default world and apply in real life?

Mark Rabin

00:07:40.900 - 00:07:44.180

Where can people find more about you and your business?

Ben Sieger

00:07:44.500 - 00:08:16.370

Certainly.

So in the default world, Halo hybrid solutions or halohybrid.com we're going to look, we focus on as a primary, as an electrical contractor where we do commercial charging.

So this might be a supercharger for Tesla or this might be say that the charging solutions you have at a hotel, that's what we're doing, the cash flow of the business. But what we're really getting into is the micro grids.

This is more the data center scale where we can now take the same lessons learned on these more, I don't know, approachable projects and then we can apply those to the micro grids.

Mark Rabin

00:08:16.610 - 00:08:19.010

These are the nanogrids or whatever. Exactly.

Ben Sieger

00:08:19.010 - 00:08:23.650

But it's the same thing, right? It's all canvas, all the same language. It's just a larger scale.

Mark Rabin

00:08:23.810 - 00:08:26.210

So yeah, love it. Well, keep up the good work, man.

Ben Sieger

00:08:26.210 - 00:08:26.810

Appreciate it.

Mark Rabin

00:08:26.810 - 00:08:27.130

Thank you.

Ben Sieger

00:08:27.200 - 00:08:27.600

Cheers.

Mark Rabin

00:08:28.000 - 00:10:42.770

All right. I hope you enjoyed seeing that really innovative mashup of a cyber truck and solar and batteries and solar shade. Go Ben Seeger.

And thank you for showing us your amazing innovation. So I love that there's so much innovation on Playa. Lots of folks sort of Jimmy rigging all types of different contraptions.

I don't have enough time here on this episode to show all of that stuff, but really there was all types of stuff like batteries in, you know, a shift pod with solar panels and solar panels on trucks and vehicles and homemade systems and you know, janky batteries like cobbled together. It's just awesome that and everybody's got some take on it and lots of hybrid stuff too.

So Sunbelt was out there with hybrid generators which there'll be some photos here at the very end. But yeah, lots of good stuff going on.

So the second part here, partway through the week, got to go on the Abraxas art car for a renewable energy tour on Playa.

And I just love being on, you know, these tours because you get to meet so many like minded people and folks involved in getting Burning man off of fossil fuels. And yeah, just an incredible community that's really that deeply cares about the work that they're doing on Playa.

Both innovators and folks at the org Abraxas takes us around the Playa to go visit solarpunks, the Burning Man Org, Micro Grids, Dragon Wings and many other projects. That are out there. Um, but in this edition those are the three that we'll talk to. So I hope you enjoy.

The sound quality is a little off because I was recording just with the microphone on my phone. So yeah, hopefully you can bear with it.

And then we're going to have deeper dive interviews with solarpunks and Dragon Wings and then we're also going to have a special interview with Bao Chickawa and their solar shape structures. Stick around.

Solarpunks

00:10:43.570 - 00:14:10.770

It's the harshest environment in the world, arguably for events. And so we came out here in 2022 super naive, got a bunch of prosumer gear, so it wasn't like professional gear or anything.

And we kind of hacked together this very manual microgrid and decided to do an entire camp that was run fully off of solar. So no diesel backup, nothing like that. That we erected a 50 kilowatt array at that time, but about 250 kilowatt hours of storage.

And you know, it was the hardest year, hardest burn. Everything went wrong except the power. Like we lost.

I mean we had three shipwreck boys like 80 mile per hour winds and more, but our power never went down. And we actually had more than enough power not just for ourselves, but also for our neighbors.

And so we actually started giving away free cleanup energy as well to artists and more that were coming over and wanting some support. And then since then we've taken all the gear back to la.

We started doing what we call creative community micro grids and giving away solar energy for free to creatives and non profits and communities. We really love community gatherings and supporting that. And also just game planning on how, how we expand this further beyond just our own camp.

And so we put our heads down and over the last two years it's been a journey to come back to the playa and see how we could do this in a bigger way and wanted to really show how powerful the technology was.

Now where it's not just part of our own camp, but we actually teamed up with Mayan Warrior here and now are fully powering their whole camp infrastructure, including ours, fully off the power of the sun. So what you see over there is a 300 kilowatt array which by the way, so in 2022 it took us about three days to put up a 50 kilowatt array.

Now once everything's site marked properly with just two people in a forklift, we can deploy a 50 kilowatt array in just a little under an hour. So you see it's amazing technological curves and it's definitely something to sound.

And what you see over there also is about 5.4 megawatt hours of battery storage. So right now we're generating anywhere from 1.5 to 2 megawatt hours a day.

The equivalent of that could is basically above like 50 US households with average use per day. And we have more than enough energy. Actually we had enough solar that we were actually curtailing the solar.

And originally we didn't want to just give it to ev, we wanted to save it for all the mutant vehicles and the ebikes and art around Playa. But we just ended up having so much that we ended up also charging EVs as well. And so over there, what you see is our solar station.

And that is a spot for people to come charge their e bikes, charge their phones, borrow chargers, batteries as well for art. All of it's fully powerful, powered off of the sun. And it's also educational as well.

There's different quotes from like Buckminster Fuller to diagrams about decentralized clean energy and just how important it is, like beyond sustainability. I think what really gets us hyped about clean energy is that it is actually a really democratizing force.

We're not just talking about equity for the planet, we're talking about equity on a human level. And we really wanted to also use use this project to show the power of community owned clean energy generation.

George Reed III

00:14:15.570 - 00:16:11.440

Call us the Unicorn. For those technically inclined, it's around 30kW DC, a little bit over 100kwh of energy storage.

We have three of these that power the man, the temple, including the builds and about half of Center Camps power. For perspective, this is about 1/10 of what solarpunks has out there in the thing.

But it's something that really shows how we can quickly deploy a system that can provide a lot of power. The ones here are on distributed grids.

The one at Center Camp is really interesting because it's a collaboration with Sun Belt where we're really looking at the ways that you can integrate intermittent renewable sources with diesel generator grids, which people haven't really done. People just say, oh, we need this much power, let's put a giant generator, right? And they're just like blasting it, you know, these things.

So we've been able to really work with them. Those technologies have now been through the advancements at Burning man event.

We've been told by Sunbelt that they've deployed over a thousand microgrids based on the technology and the learning and the R and D that they had here. So we can see how these sort of things all work together.

I also want to point out to the right there, those yellow things that's called the Solar Library. This is also something that our, the off donation or Net zero or whatever supports. And we, what they do is they charge little batteries.

The artists get a card, they check it in, they, they pull out a battery, they charge our piece. When it dies, they go and they do it and they swap it.

So this is like a, a test pilot between like, you know, that sort of different way of, of powering, you know, these like sort of temporary communities where you, where you can eliminate generators. I think they're powering over 19 or 20 art pieces right now with this thing. All for free. It's a gift from these folks.

So is there anyone from Solar Library on the, on the thing? They're amazing people. Look them up. Google the thing. It's really transformative stuff. And I think I have a question.

Mark Rabin

00:16:11.440 - 00:16:11.920

I have a question.

George Reed III

00:16:11.920 - 00:16:12.960

You've got a question? Yes.

Mark Rabin

00:16:13.200 - 00:16:18.050

So every year you pack up those, those solar panels and put them in the container with all the batteries.

George Reed III

00:16:18.050 - 00:16:20.130

Yes, those two, that entire thing fits.That's.It's designed to be packed and played like, and traveled. So everything fits in the two containers. Pack them up. I think you usually put them up in like a day.

Mark Rabin

00:16:28.210 - 00:16:28.530

Right.

George Reed III

00:16:28.530 - 00:17:09.740

So that's the idea. Easily transportable, easy to put up and down. That's a prototype.

We have over, I think just over 300 kilowatt hours of solar in the aggregate around, around here we have Scarabs, the Birdie man projects powering I think now also separately, 19 art projects. If you see those little like portable trailers that run around, we call them the Scarabs.

And then we have I think three or four other smaller prototypes that we're looking at testing for like other different use cases. So if anyone has specific questions, they can come.

I won't bore the whole group because the music sounds better than my voice, but happy to answer any questions. Want to talk tech? All right, back to the music. Thank you.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:17:13.740 - 00:17:22.580

This could potentially be a real way that we can power a majority of the city. And I think that is the thing that we really want to show is that we can power an 80,000 person city with all renewables. So shout out to Solar Punks for stepping up the game too. Yeah, solar punks in 2029, 2030, we could have a majority. Right? We really need about like probably 20 megawatts of stuff out here.

Mark Rabin

00:17:39.720 - 00:17:44.960

Yeah, Right. Hey, how Much. How much capacity total?

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:17:44.960 - 00:17:59.160

Here we have about 125 kilowatt solar 150 kilowatt with another 75k surge. So 225 kilowatt surge AC 208 in kind of five sections here.

Mark Rabin

00:17:59.160 - 00:17:59.960

And batteries.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:18:00.840 - 00:18:05.080

Batteries, batteries is 75 time 5, whatever that is.

Marcus De Paula

00:18:05.560 - 00:18:07.960

How do they hold up in a wind storm?

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:18:09.000 - 00:18:25.160

Great.

So we've had them out in over 45 miles an hour. We've had like res wind studies done on them. We close at 20, 23 miles per hour sustained.

Cuz that's when that's where construction stops and stuff gets really messy anyways. So it takes four minutes to open or close.

Person 11

00:18:25.560 - 00:18:27.730

Does dust affect the effectiveness?

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:18:28.290 - 00:18:39.970

It can like a handful of percent, but they're pretty clean now. A little bit of rain but also closing them knocks a lot of dust off. That's electric vehicle battery technology.

Marcus De Paula

00:18:43.010 - 00:18:44.210

How awesome is it?

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:18:44.610 - 00:18:46.370

I think it's kind of awesome.

Person 12

00:18:46.370 - 00:18:50.090

Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:18:50.090 - 00:18:58.420

We, we landed on Monday of build. We dropped all five on Tuesday, we unwrapped them on Wednesday and we're powering the camp by Wednesday night.

Person 13

00:18:58.420 - 00:19:01.980

So what's the size of the battery?

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:19:02.620 - 00:19:06.620

Oh, they're 75 kilowatt hours each. And they're also awesome.

Mark Rabin

00:19:10.940 - 00:19:28.070

Abraxas tour. Just a little flavor for what's going on on Playa.

I had the opportunity to do a deeper dive with Xtina and Corey from solarpunks and also Dr. Ryan Martina from Dragon Wings. So here you go. Hope you enjoy.

Solarpunks

00:19:29.910 - 00:19:35.430

Hi, I'm Xtina with solarpunks, Corey with Solarpunks.

Mark Rabin

00:19:35.990 - 00:19:47.080

Amazing. And I see that you guys have one of the largest solar and battery arrays on the Playa.

Can you tell me a little bit about solarpunks and what you were doing here at Burning Man?

Xtina Chu

00:19:47.560 - 00:21:47.550

Yeah, absolutely.

So Solarpunks, you know, we started off as just fellow friends in the creative fields trying to decarbonize, realized that there was nothing turnkey out there.

So got a bunch of batteries, inverters, solar panels, found an electrical engineer and just started figuring out how to construct solar based microgrids and decided to lean into the civic experiment of Burning Man. You know, it's a temporary city for 80,000 people.

And in 2022 we actually came out here with a 50 kilowatt array, about 250 kilowatt hours of storage, and ran a full camp off of solar and in the last few years have been figuring out not only how to bring that impact off Playa by giving the energy for free to different creatives, nonprofits, and more. But also how do we scale this further at Black Rock City?

Because a lot of the implications of what we're doing on this experimental project has residents also in the real world, especially in the work that we come from and do. So this year we have representing Black Rock City's first utility scale clean energy power plant. We're really excited about this.

It's about 300 kilowatts of solar, about 5.4 megawatt hours of battery storage.

And we're still supplying free clean energy not only for our own camp infrastructure including RVs and more, but also for Mine Warrior across the street. We trench across the street. They're camp about 300 plus people with RVs air conditioning.

They're the biggest theme camp on Playa and they are fully running off of clean electrons, no diesel generators. And then across the way we also built what we're calling solar station.

It's basically the clean energy alternative to hell Station on Playa which supplies all the diesel for the camps and the art cars. We're supplying free solar energy for mutant vehicles, e bikes, phones and art projects as well.

So that's been running 247 and yeah, excited of this first of a kind project and I don't know if you want to add anything to that.

Corey Johnson

00:21:48.030 - 00:21:49.230

That was very comprehensive.

Mark Rabin

00:21:51.150 - 00:22:02.420

And also off play those solarpunks is gaining a lot of traction as well. So you guys are providing clean energy for artists and projects of all kinds as well?

Corey Johnson

00:22:02.500 - 00:23:05.880

Yeah.

So just before the Burn 2025 solarpunks was granted our 501C3 status with the mission of removing replacing fossil fuel machines in creative industries.

So we have a couple different programs, kind of our bread and butter program, Clean Creative community Microgrids that Christina has really spearheaded where we use the batteries from the system that we did in 2022. We give them to different artists, filmmakers, community groups, anybody and everybody that's independent and needs free energy or batteries.

So we do that pretty consistently. And then we have a couple other initiatives in the world works as well.

Working on a clean energy resilience hub in Los Angeles in the wake of LA fire disaster with the Los Angeles Equestrian Center, Los Angeles City Recreations and parks and scale microgrids. And we're in the process of filing for a big grant to try and do that. That would be kind of like a hybrid stationary mobile micro grid prototype.

Mark Rabin

00:23:06.120 - 00:23:10.850

Something where you could charge your your main batteries off of clean energy to be deployed or wherever.

Corey Johnson

00:23:10.930 - 00:23:44.460

Yeah, so. So they'd have a, you know, a solar and storage Hub or a station as we call it.

And then there would be some kind of like charging infrastructure there.

And it could be a home base for mobile battery systems that then get charged with the clean electrons and that are available as like resilience for disasters, but then could also be made available to, you know, Warner Brothers is right across LA river right there. And all the other kind of commercial sort of like aggregate the.

The use cases of deployments to help create better economics to further this technology.

Mark Rabin

00:23:45.100 - 00:24:06.910

Totally. And what's the.

And you've been working with the blackrock or Burning Man Org is the vision then to have many of these things spread throughout the city? It's still early days. Of course, this is a first of its kind prototype. But you know, the success of this. Where do you see it going?

Corey Johnson

00:24:07.070 - 00:25:27.880

Yeah, in this moment we see everything being successfully demobilized and getting back to our beds. Yeah, but the vision, yeah, it's been a big, it's been a big few months, a big few years to get to this point.

We have worked with the Burning man project, specifically the regeneration department and placement and emergency safety team and the operations team and the executive team to make this possible. We think it's been, it seems like it's been pretty well received. We don't know exactly where it's going.

The big vision I guess would be to continue to grow the size and scale of our clean energy power plant. We're kind of Ride It 2 and K on the top.

So the real, the kind of pie in the sky vision would be to like extend our solar array around the outside perimeter of the city and to kind of spider this network of transmission and power distribution to power big theme camps, especially the high profile, biggest loads on the Playa. And we think, we think that what we're sitting on is one of, is at least in the. In the running of the.

One of the most scalable, viable, feasible, tangible systems or approaches to help Burning man reach its 20, 2030 sustainability roadmap.

Xtina Chu

00:25:28.440 - 00:27:29.460

And I'll add to that, I mean it's definitely more than just to power the large theme camps. I think in general what we're seeing is that there is more and more batteries making their way onto Playa each year.

The challenge is that they're typically backed by diesel because there's no regeneration strategy. Right. And so we're still operating in a fossil fuel paradigm in that case.

And what we identified here and that we're working on, this technical demonstration of is really at the utility scale level, which enables us to actually uplevel all these battery systems that otherwise would require diesel to be refilled. Now we have solar. And there's. This is a very modular type of system. There's different ways we could deploy it.

And it's not just for large themed cams, it's for meeting vehicles, it's for, you know, the citizens, it's for art projects.

Yeah, yeah.

I think one thing that's interesting that a couple of people have said is, like, when you, like, if you look at the solar right here, it's like, oh, my God, that's so much solar. This is about half of it that you're seeing right now, but it looks like it's like, oh, my God, this is so much solar.

But then by the other side of the coin is like, this is only how much solar it takes to power the largest theme camp at Burning Man. So, you know, like, we see this work being part of this kind of larger mobile battery technology. Clean energy movement. Shout out.

Mark Rabin, portable electric for being the og. Shout out. Ryan Wortana, Dragon Wing. Shout out. Neil Overdrive. Shout out. Dpw Shout out. George Reed Regeneration. Shout out. Level placement. Shout out.

Like, so many people that have been a part of this. So, you know, we're trying to.

We're definitely trying to push the envelope, do some new technology demonstration, show that the, like, we can and should go big with this because there is this kind of, like, predisposition that solar is, like, limited and we're like, we want to power more than, like, an FMB stand or something. We want to take the big loads, the big stages, the big art cars, all that kind of stuff.

Mark Rabin

00:27:29.460 - 00:28:06.800

Yeah, I, Yeah, I envision this going into, like, quadrants, essentially, and then having clean distro throughout. Right. And camps can kind of sign on or whatever, so you can start to build out one zone at a time. Yeah, but everybody.

So I've heard quite a bit, people like, oh, well, this is a lot of. A lot of land for this, for the solar. Right. Like, and.

And I was like, it's not that much land for 300 kilowatts, because you could position this in a way. I don't know if people commented on, like, oh, well, it's so big and so heavy. No, sure.

Xtina Chu

00:28:07.760 - 00:28:24.250

No, no, no, you got it. I mean, well, really real quick. I mean, we are generating like, close to 2 megawatt hours a day. It's quite a lot.

I mean, that's over, like, it's at 1.5 megawatt hours a day. That was like the equivalent of 50 US household average energy use.

Mark Rabin

00:28:24.250 - 00:28:27.570

And we're not huge diesel generators. That's underpowered for sure.

Xtina Chu

00:28:27.570 - 00:28:39.810

Absolutely. So this isn't just for mine Warrior. I mean we had more than enough solar that we were curtailing actually.

And we were able to provide charging for EVs as well. Well, which we weren't originally planning on doing. So there's a definitely cybertruck there.

Mark Rabin

00:28:39.810 - 00:28:40.770

Yeah, there still is.

Xtina Chu

00:28:41.010 - 00:28:44.530

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Do you want to cover the real estate?

Corey Johnson

00:28:44.530 - 00:29:32.850

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. There's. There's definitely like a, like a general sense I guess that like solar power is like a low density power source.

And I guess in some environments it is.

But when you really look at it like covering rooftops, covering ground, I mean land is definitely not the limiting factor out at Burning man here, wherein like our entire hub is like less than an acre, you know, and there's infinite space. So if there's anywhere that's great to try this out, it's here.

And you know, like we're definitely taking utility scale assets and system components that Normally sit for 10, 15, 20 years. So like of course there's like innovation and integration and technology that needs to improve.

But like the core thing is like, I don't know, it's just not that big of a deal.

Mark Rabin

00:29:32.850 - 00:29:47.970

Yeah, I agree, I agree. I think the thing is it scares people a little bit because they don't understand there's a lot of moving parts here.

I think diesel at the end of the day is still just like set it and forget it and then run out of gas and fill it up.

Corey Johnson

00:29:48.050 - 00:30:54.880

Yeah, I mean our entire system is based on diesel generators and refilling and all the infrastructure around gas and oil and the subsidies organization around that, like our entire society. And like we have a lot of respect for that. Like oil and gas has built our modern society and we enjoy a lot of the, the fruits of that.

You know, that said, they're, you know, electric systems are so much more efficient and so much like it's just like it is a superior technology. We're hitting the point on the economic cross curve where they're five finally becoming really tangible.

And it's like, you know, people don't think about infrastructure is supposed to be invisible. It's behind the curtain. Like people don't think about like use a generator because that's what you've always used like for all of time, you know.

So of course if there's something new, it's going to be like, it's going to Be uncomfortable. Any new technology is always that.

And I think even like you look at someone like David Shearer who's been working in Solar for 30 years, he's still saying it's early. Yeah. You know, so like it's really early and we're definitely on that. Like, I think it's okay.

Mark Rabin

00:30:54.880 - 00:31:00.240

I think it's now though. I don't think it's too early anymore. And I think you guys have hit it right at the right time.

Corey Johnson

00:31:00.240 - 00:31:15.490

I mean, hopefully we'll see over the next few years. It'll be interesting to watch this in a few years and see where we're at and what's going on.

But like, yeah, I mean we're, we're definitely swinging for it and like, we feel a responsibility to do this work because like, if we don't do it, who's going to, you know?

Xtina Chu

00:31:15.490 - 00:31:48.660

Yeah, yeah.

And just to like illustrate a little bit further with just a couple, I guess, data points for, you know, since we started doing this a few years ago, the cost of battery has come down 30%. And then back in 2022, when we first deployed our 50 kilowatt array, that took us about a few days to do.

Now, once everything is site marked with our the quick deploy solar we're using, it takes a little under an hour, which is two people and a forklift. So we're definitely seeing exponential curves here that are really supporting this transition towards electrification.

Mark Rabin

00:31:49.060 - 00:31:58.460

Yeah, so just easy peasy layout. 300 kilowatts of solar, 5.4 megawatt hours of batteries, and off you go, just like that.

Corey Johnson

00:31:58.460 - 00:31:59.860

It's truly that easy.

Mark Rabin

00:32:02.580 - 00:32:10.630

Just maybe just talk me through this just quickly, a few of the technical components at a high level just to how this thing works.

Corey Johnson

00:32:10.870 - 00:34:04.760

Totally. So starting with generation, we have the 5V Mavericks behind us, which we are taking down already. They're about 19ft wide by about 140ft long.

I think there's about 90 panels on each one. They generate about 50 kilowatts per unit. And we have six of them out here to form our 300 kilowatts of power. Power.

And then at the base of that you see all the DC strings that Dave, Mr. Earthman, is working on there. That is our solar trailer where all of the DC strings are then inverted into AC energy. Shout out to our Peak 3 Flex inverter and our.

And our AC output there.

And then you see our SP1 container, our power conditioning and distribution hub that you can see the best one input, the best two input and the solar input. All Coming in, we actually have a, we do have a gen set attached to the system as well for resiliency.

So if the state of charge was to drop below x percent, say 20%, it would automatically kick on. Because if we didn't have the appropriate regeneration without having to do any kind of hot swaps.

And then you have the four zones of output on the side, everything at 480.

And then you can see that little, the little office computer, laptop room kind of at the end that you can go in where we have all the metering laptop, little air conditioned chamber. Because theoretically this stuff should be able, you know, right now it's very, it's containerized, it's on kind of different pieces.

We do think that the thing can be, you know, exponentially smaller, more efficient and can kind of all be serviced from the conveyance itself, including the Mavericks. So it comes up and the same form factor as any kind of like standard entertainment production or live tour kind of setup.

Mark Rabin

00:34:05.000 - 00:34:16.840

And one of these units, one of these battery packs can power stages, can power absolutely huge, huge events. You know, I see something like this powering Coachella like this can do it.

Corey Johnson

00:34:16.840 - 00:35:18.850

Yeah, absolutely. We did a lot of. When we first started this work, there's not much load data.

Like we were just in another talk down at Playa Alchemist, someone was like, how much like what's the like kilowatts per person? And we're like honestly like the load data doesn't even exist right now. So we're calculating that.

And that was kind of humbling in the beginning that we really had to go bottom up with the data collection and the approach.

But we did a lot of studies over a number of years to really validate and verify that the megawatt scale is truly where the action is to be able to powerful, meaningful, culturally meaningful, environmentally impactful results.

So we don't see, we're not, we are best agnostic, let's say, but we have aligned ourselves with the Tesla megapack in this early phase as the kind of premier grid scale technology software platform. Best solution, which is what you're sitting on right now.

Xtina Chu

00:35:19.090 - 00:35:55.420

Yeah. Just to also illustrate further, like we did, as Corey mentioned, like a lot of energy studies early, including the Hollywood Bowl.

So one of these units can power multiple nights at the Hollywood bowl without even needing co located solar, without needing regeneration. So these are all Lego pieces. They could all be deployed in different ways to suit the application. And we're excited.

This is like the first full system in effect, but in the, in different capacities, whether It's a festival or like a one day show. You might be seeing different parts at play. So yeah, very modular.

Mark Rabin

00:35:55.820 - 00:35:59.660

Yeah, well, yeah. Anything else? And then you know, where can we find you guys

Corey Johnson

00:35:59.660 - 00:37:38.170

You can find us at SolarPunks.club. find us at energyclub.com. just come find us through friends and the network. It's really amazing.

Like people just show up and just like are curious about what we're doing and there's something really powerful about like because you just don't like normally like even myself, like I didn't know what a kilowatt was. I didn't know what a kilowatt hour. I didn't know dc, ac, all these things.

But there's something really like a light switch that goes off literally in people when it's like, wow, the power is being generated right there, it's being transported right there, it's being stored right there and it's going right there.

So like all of the transmission and distribution approach that we've had, we've really worked to make it entertainment industry or like off grid expeditionary standard. So a lot of the crews, like we don't want it to feel like some like crazy new technology.

Like people just want their power to work, they don't want to have to think about it. So it's kind of like our burden to get the heavy stuff done.

We see, we see a world where like this thing rolls up, it has a kind of production lead where they're introducing this energy production manager concept and a technical lead.

It should really be sitting on a laptop and then the cable can be run with festival labor and heavy equipment and side ops and you know it can be safely monitored and controlled.

But from like an entertainment production standard, it just goes on and you just know that you've got enough power and you have a nice little iPad that shows where you're at, look at some nice graphs and you know, sit around and watch the show and have abeer

Mark Rabin

00:37:44.690 - 00:37:45.250

And have it powered by renewable energy. Thanks guys.

Corey Johnson

00:37:45.330 - 00:37:46.050

Thank you Mark.

Xtina Chu

00:37:46.450 - 00:37:49.810

Appreciate you. Thank you for all the foundational work you've done in this space.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:37:53.890 - 00:38:02.340

Hi, I'm Dr. Ryan Wartina. Little update here on dragon wings. This is year four of Southern Beams builds bringing Dragon wings out to the Playa for the foamy homies.

Mark Rabin

00:38:09.100 - 00:38:11.500

This is year four. You've been, you've had these on Playa?

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:38:11.500 - 00:38:11.940

Yeah.

Mark Rabin

00:38:11.940 - 00:38:12.380

Nice.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:38:12.699 - 00:39:27.770

And it's always been a plan to go ahead and help this village go ahead and go 100% solar renewable as a demonstration for the 1400 camps, you know, here at Black Rock City. And yeah, the first year we came and we powered the kitchen. The second year we came out and powered the tea house.

The third year we came out and brought three dragon wings and powered, you know, about half to two thirds of the camp. And this year we have five dragon wings. There's three up here in front and then two all the way out in the back.

And we're powering this whole village from the Foamy homies foam dome to the kitchen to the foam dome sound system. The Tea Tigers tea house is down here. The time machine is right there. Zendo's camp, the, the Soft Landing group, their camp is back here.

And the Heart Collective also. So kind of like four major camps, 330 people and we've been running on renewables for the whole. All those camps, all these camps.

Mark Rabin

00:39:27.770 - 00:39:28.330

It's amazing.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:39:28.330 - 00:40:41.980

Huge block. Five dragon wings years of not just like bringing the technology up, also working with the campers. Yeah, right.

Like when this was first introduced it was like, no, don't take my 50amp plug for my RV air conditioner. But you know, we've introduced like other options, the swamp coolers, other stuff that also works really well. And that was the first year.

Second year people loved it because they got to like, you know, get powered by dragon wings and they were like a little bit more ready. So that was that second year was like the first year and then the third year. Everyone's now coming with their own batteries. Yeah, right.

Everyone's kind of called in. They're telling me about like how they've learned stuff about energy and how to operate. And this is great.

This is a real life situation of living with solar battery. This is like how the future is. And now this fourth year has been really great. Tons of support from all the campers at different camps.

And you know, we have to do some things a little bit differently at times. Like maybe we have to not run so many air conditioners in the tea house. Maybe we figure out how to rotate air conditioning and hot water making.

So yeah.

Mark Rabin

00:40:42.220 - 00:40:45.300

Are you metering everything or is getting all the data?

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:40:45.300 - 00:40:57.580

Everything is metered and everything's going up via cellular, you know, low bandwidth. So we actually get, are getting data through on the cell network, which is kind of nice. So you have.

Mark Rabin

00:40:58.060 - 00:41:00.310

So how much total solar do you

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:41:00.310 - 00:41:16.230

have here we have 125 kilowatt solar. We have 150 kilowatt of three phase 208 power. Here we have two 25,

Mark Rabin

00:41:16.230 - 00:41:17.550

375, 375 kWh. Five times 75.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:41:17.550 - 00:41:20.790

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks Mark. I needed that 375.

Mark Rabin

00:41:20.790 - 00:41:22.950

I heard that earlier on the tour.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:41:23.030 - 00:41:23.630

Oh, right.

Marcus De Paula

00:41:23.630 - 00:41:24.150

Thank you.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:41:25.940 - 00:41:29.740

And that's much energy source. We also have 150 kilowatt gas generator.

Mark Rabin

00:41:29.740 - 00:41:30.300

Yeah.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:41:30.460 - 00:41:37.940

That we have hooked up in the back and being controlled with automatic generator start. So just dialing that in exactly.

Mark Rabin

00:41:39.900 - 00:41:49.100

Yeah. And that's just like obviously it completes the micro grid essentially. If anything goes down, you've got the backup to supplement it. Charge whatever.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:41:49.340 - 00:42:03.920

Charge whatever. So. So yeah, it's really nice. You kind of want that backup. The world will have backups as we kind of transition.

But we can also have additional dragon wings or additional batteries or additional electric vehicles here to go ahead and also provide that backup.

Mark Rabin

00:42:04.560 - 00:42:23.610

How important is it to have the buy in of the camp and the support of the Org right now? Because I know it's a time of transition. The Org is keen on this. They're looking at this as pilot program projects to scale.

You know, how important does that play in this? Or is this just purely an initiative from the camp and.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:42:25.210 - 00:42:57.020

No, I mean I think we've been working on this initiative through BlackRock Labs and I think the org has done its role also at pushing its vendors for sustainable technologies and sustainable solutions. And because we do want to meet our 2029 goals of having this whole city, you know, fossil fuel free effectively or net zero carbon emissions.

So, you know, Sunbelt's really stepped up. We've been collaborating with Sunbelt for a number of years here.

Mark Rabin

00:42:57.020 - 00:42:58.620

You've got all eyes on this stuff.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:42:58.620 - 00:43:25.990

Oh yeah, no, we've done pilots out at big name events with them. And then also here. And it was wonderful. We had a detailed map.

We landed our dragon wings in one day and then we all got up early in the morning, we undid the dragon wing, Sunbelt dropped the distro and we had like a micro grid, 150 kilowatt micro grid with backup generator going by that night. It was a one day setup.

Mark Rabin

00:43:26.710 - 00:43:29.590

So you pull up one of these 53 footers.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:43:29.670 - 00:43:30.230

Yeah.

Mark Rabin

00:43:31.110 - 00:43:39.600

With 50 kilowatts. How long does it take to. Once you pull this thing up, how quickly can you be generating solar and sending power out?

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:43:39.600 - 00:43:53.360

So as soon as we pull up, I can go ahead and activate a button and activate the power. The power outlets. So likely there's already energy in the energy storage on there. So we can be in within a minute or two providing power service.

Mark Rabin

00:43:53.440 - 00:43:53.920

Yeah.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:43:54.240 - 00:44:17.980

Taking the tarps off two people is about 1520 minutes, we remove the straps, that's another like four minutes. And then we press a button on the front, activate the system and then dragon wings will open in four minutes. And so what is that, like 25?

So yeah, you know, you're well under an hour, maybe under 45 minutes.

Marcus De Paula

00:44:17.980 - 00:44:18.500

Yeah.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:44:18.740 - 00:44:38.470

To have a unit up. And so we had a crew of like four people out here. And so we can just go ahead and boom, boom, boom. It was great. Dragon wings this year.

This year at Burning Man 20, 25, the, the build week was kind of hammered with some big wins.

Mark Rabin

00:44:38.470 - 00:44:40.270

Like what, like 60 miles an hour?

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:44:40.350 - 00:45:12.840

Yeah, I've heard everywhere from like 75. I think we definitely clocked 45. But then things got pretty, pretty hectic in those moments too. But it was, it was great.

I think we had dragon wings out to above 25 miles an hour. We've been training a new crew too and how to go ahead and operate dragon wings.

And again, it's been cool because it was like a really a, a one day training and then they could go ahead and do those operations, pull them in and it was great. So power, power keeps running even when the wings are closed.

Mark Rabin

00:45:12.840 - 00:45:13.320

Yeah.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:45:13.640 - 00:45:20.480

So wonderful. Actually it still even generates some, a little bit of power too when closed because there's still some exposure.

Mark Rabin

00:45:20.480 - 00:45:30.040

So talk me through. So you've got a major wind event. Do you pull them in in anticipation or is it a certain wind speed somehow that triggers something to pull it in?

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:45:30.600 - 00:46:04.320

So we just, this is a important set of like field trials for us.

Like one of the purposes of having all of these units out is to kind of really see where the, where the weak points are, where the break points are, to really kind of push them to their test.

So what we did was we went ahead and we left the systems in a manual mode, but we have a full auto mode where drag queens will close at 20 miles an hour.

Marcus De Paula

00:46:04.640 - 00:46:05.000

Right.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:46:05.000 - 00:46:15.940

And so we went ahead and let the Ammon actually go ahead and hit that 25 miles an hour. So we can actually see that would happen. Then we went ahead and manually closed it.

Marcus De Paula

00:46:16.900 - 00:46:17.220

So.

Mark Rabin

00:46:17.220 - 00:46:22.500

Yeah, so it triggered an alert at the very least. And then. Yeah, and then you came. That's so friggin cool.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:46:24.020 - 00:47:01.630

Yeah, I mean like we, we have a lot of like the full, there's a, there's a full autonomous version of dragon wings and a couple, couple more features that we have actually developed now and ready to move. But the rest of the software controls for the full automation, the, you know, how long, at what speed does the wind need to be. Right.

All of that's configurable for, you know, tiers of speed level warning. Like, you know, and what time duration does it need to be at before it activates and also what wind speed does it need to drop to before it.

Mark Rabin

00:47:01.630 - 00:47:01.950

Yeah.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:47:01.950 - 00:47:03.430

And how long does it stay closed?

Mark Rabin

00:47:03.430 - 00:47:07.150

And these trailers are stable. Like there's no, there's no wobbling or anything like that.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:47:07.230 - 00:47:39.880

You know, we, we were wondering about that because we've deployed before a single one on a trailer in a windy area and there was a bit of movement, you know, and we did it here too.

And what we actually conclude, what we've concluded is like it's actually better for it to be on a truck like this and able to move with the wind as opposed to being bolted down to the ground. And those same forces are coming and so they're all going to be going into the wings.

Mark Rabin

00:47:40.360 - 00:47:40.720

Right.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:47:40.720 - 00:47:51.730

It's like, oh, it's, it's a big square cube stuck. So I really, I like, I like this. We can get a little bit of, you know, flying action too.

Mark Rabin

00:47:51.730 - 00:48:00.890

So I love this. How many of these are there in the world today? And what generation are you on today? A prototype or commercial unit?

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:48:01.210 - 00:48:14.730

Yeah. So there's now eight out in the world and one of them is our prototype unit. And that's, you know, we have a lot of interest.

Mark Rabin

00:48:15.050 - 00:48:15.530

Yeah.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:48:18.740 - 00:48:58.430

Not going to spoil the future, the future news. But really, honestly, what we're focused on right now is perfecting the product.

I think we have some really wonderful, you know, top tier customers in construction and automotive and events and heavy equipment. And you know, our job right now is just to really like professional and tune the product. This is our third generation. We're ready to build.

We have capacity to build 20 to 50 units a year. We also have like the looming investment tax credit sunset. So we're highly motivated to actually kind of step up that production.

Mark Rabin

00:48:58.509 - 00:49:00.230

Is that federal or is that state?

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:49:00.230 - 00:49:02.630

That's federal tax credit.

Mark Rabin

00:49:02.630 - 00:49:05.190

So it's like you have something in California too, right. That you can.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:49:05.190 - 00:49:22.840

There are in California, but that's also a very limited budget. But the federal tax credit, because we have 84% domestic content, we get an extra 10% on the 30 tax credit. So 40 tax credit is actually pretty good.

Mark Rabin

00:49:23.000 - 00:49:25.200

And these are made in America. You said 84%.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:49:25.200 - 00:49:25.760

Oh yeah.

Mark Rabin

00:49:25.760 - 00:49:31.560

And they're not tied to the grid. So you're still essentially just power services equipment.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:49:31.720 - 00:49:32.120

Yeah.

Mark Rabin

00:49:32.120 - 00:49:35.190

At the end of the day. So there's no really, I mean it's just a generator

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:49:39.270 - 00:49:59.190

Yeah. just a generator that makes it's own fuel. You know, we actually have just went through a process to be able to offer leasing. And I'm not. We don't talk about money on the play yet, but what I could do equivalents. And it's basically.

You can get dragon wings for the same as renting. Yeah, the generator without the fuel.

Mark Rabin

00:49:59.680 - 00:50:01.480

Yeah, exactly. You have to do the total cost

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:50:01.480 - 00:50:04.960

of ownership, lower cost than the generator. So I love it.

Mark Rabin

00:50:05.120 - 00:50:21.120

Yeah, I think I love it. Ryan, these are great. So right now you've got. I'm just gonna zoom out.

You can keep talking, but you've got three dragon wings here at the front and then you've got two around the back. Oh, you know what? Yeah.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:50:21.200 - 00:51:09.710

Oh. I will jump in and say, like, this has been absolutely great. This is like one of the. This is a very popular camp at Burning Man.

It's a place where you can get washed and foamed and dance and hundreds, if not thousand, thousand people could be out here. And it's very, very hot. And this year, with the dragon wings side by side and then one elevated.

The elevated made a good shadow and shade for the stage up there. And then all the people, we probably fit like 500 people, 400 people, you know, underneath the dragon wings on both sides. It was like. It was great.

People loved it. It was a much happier scenario being out here.

Mark Rabin

00:51:10.270 - 00:51:13.110

Yeah. You never have people hanging around a diesel generator like that.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:51:13.110 - 00:51:14.030

No, that's for sure.

Mark Rabin

00:51:14.030 - 00:51:29.030

No, man, there's still so many janky shitty ass generators on. Playa. Makes me just like. I can't believe it. I still can't believe it in this modern time. But anyway, there it is.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:51:30.230 - 00:51:32.710

Things change. I hear they're not making the penny anymore.

Mark Rabin

00:51:33.030 - 00:51:40.150

Oh, yeah, that's good. Who needs the penny? Where can. Where can people find out about dragon wings?

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:51:41.110 - 00:51:48.140

Oh, I think, yeah. The Earth Internet. Pretty easy. Dragon wing solar generators.

Mark Rabin

00:51:48.380 - 00:51:48.820

Nice.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:51:48.820 - 00:51:50.380

You'll find us nice.

Mark Rabin

00:51:51.100 - 00:51:54.220

Available for your Burning man camp next year.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:51:55.580 - 00:51:56.140

Yes.

Mark Rabin

00:51:57.740 - 00:51:58.540

Thanks, brother.

Dr. Ryan Whartena

00:51:58.540 - 00:51:59.100

Thank you.

Mark Rabin

00:51:59.820 - 00:53:42.240

How cool is solarpunks and dragon wings? Ah, I love it. I love it. The future of Burning Man.

Speaking of innovators, I really wanted to include Bow Chickawawa Camp in this edition because they're doing this really cool solar shade structures with modular battery systems.

So I ended up doing an off Playa interview with Chairman Bao David Hua and Marcus Depaula and they were able to really go deep with me and we had a great chat and did a screen share as well of their. Their work. And yeah, I just hope you really enjoy that this is the third and last part of this episode. And yeah, we'll see you after the interview.

Today we're here speaking with David Hua and Marcus De Paula, and I was introduced to them just recently off Playa and one of I really wanted to include them here in the. In the Burning man recap. So this is being recorded after Burning man, but what they're doing is.

Is really impressive and actually solves one of the key issues around solar structures as shade structures as solar generation paired with batteries. And I'm really excited to speak with them today.

I've heard lots about them and I worked adjacently with Camp of the Rising Buns a couple years ago and then also in 2019. So we're coming full circle here.

So, guys, thank you for joining me and maybe just give a quick little background on the camp about Chickawa and yourselves and how you guys started to integrate solar into your camp.

David Hua

00:53:43.680 - 00:54:41.940

Yeah, thanks for having us. My name's David Hua on Playa. I go by Chairman Bao. We have been a camp for about 10 years.

We started in 2014 with another sister camp called Titanic's End. And our whole goal is to gift Bao. There's these steamed white fluffy buns we give out pork buns, egg custard buns, and red bean.

We've been also fortunate enough to spawn off a number of camps. One that you mentioned, Camp of the Rising Buns, who use the sun as their inspiration to power their activities.

So we were introduced to solar and sustainability pretty early, with Rick leading that camp primarily for ourselves. And yeah, it's been quite a ride and really happy to be here.

Marcus De Paula

00:54:44.980 - 00:56:48.450

I'm Marcus Depaula. I've been with Bao for six years now and I'm primarily a fine artist. I brought sculpture to Burning Man.

I also used to work in the entertainment industry.

And that's where I've brought sort of a different and some ideas from the world of event and concert touring and theater temporary structures to Burning Man. But I didn't have a solar background.

This was a sort of continuation of the bow sort of solar experiment, but really diving headfirst into completely rethinking solar on Playa and solar as shade, shade structures as solar, and bringing some of the concepts from concert touring and temporary structures to the technology of solar that's been developed for like permanent install and residential and trying to make those two meet.

Because we saw, I think in the last number of years at Burning man, there's a lot of DIY efforts and there's a lot of commercial efforts, but there had Been a gap in something that in empowering people who were up for a DIY challenge, but maybe just needed some thought out tech.

And so we spent that time and now we're into year three of this solar shade structure system that we've built and refined and we can kind of get a little around to that.

Mark Rabin

00:56:50.610 - 00:57:21.290

I love it. That's great. Yeah. There's no question that the DIY is the name of the game, but it's also like, it's so janky.

Half the stuff out there, I mean, it's just like loose wires and cobbled together and MC fours like half together.

And so how have you guys taken that, that concept or the, you know, the stuff that's made for permanent install literally 25 years on a roof and made it modular and accessible to the beat to be set up, you know, temporarily.

Marcus De Paula

00:57:23.370 - 01:01:28.290

So really thinking about form factor and borrowing form factor ideas from. For me it was, yeah, concert touring. Right.

Because for me, the you think about the problem set of concert touring is you have all this high tech equipment, but you're moving it every single day, you're setting it up every single day. And your labor is untrained and new to it.

So it has to be in a form factor that's easy to push around and easy to figure out with untrained and unskilled labor on how to put it together. So you have to really kind of take like, yeah, in an industrial design sort of approach to it.

And in concert touring and staging and even in TV and film, they borrow and use a lot of the same equipment.

But so we decided to base the form factor around the touring case, which is available off the shelf relatively cheap because it's made on mass and easily adaptable as well because it's like basically plywood, veneered plywood, and so you can easily drill into it, screw new panel outlets to it. And so it was really easy for us to just like quickly build a solution.

And so we were going to take off the shelf inverters and batteries that are designed for residential installation and mount them inside these touring cases. And then what is also really important is putting is the interface.

Then all right, it's like, okay, great, you mount this thing in a case, but then what do you plug into on the outside of the case? Like that has to be clean as well. So that's how we did the inverters and the batteries. And then it came to solar panels. Right.

So solar panels for residential use also at an industrial scale, are built very similar form factors on an Aluminum frame, glass top. And. But the railing is designed to be like permanently screwed into roofs and to struts that you would put onto roof.

And so it took a little bit of trial and error, but wanted to use components that were off the shelf that could just be bought from a McMaster or even from Amazon to keep the cost low. But to use concepts from staging and touring where you use trusting systems, which is just pipe.

Um, and how do you get a solar panel to clamp onto a pipe?

And then my, my other sort of design challenge for myself was could I do it with no tools and do it with no tools and with little risk to drop bolts, washers, nuts. Because if you do that on Playa, it's not the same as dropping it on the concrete floor in an arena where you can just pick it up.

If you drop something, you know, on the Playa, it's like someone's going to kick dust over it. It'll get lost and you end up creating a lot of trash.

So trying to find clamping systems that we, I use from their lighting clamps and trust clamps that are quick release that you can thumb screw or twist around with your fingers or with your hands to clamp on to pipe and then integrating and adapting it with a, an off the shelf solar clip and putting those two things together.

And then you have a clamp that can work with residential solar panels, but quickly put on to and rest onto 2 inch aluminum pipe that you know, anyone can buy in bulk anywhere, you know, in the country.

Mark Rabin

01:01:28.610 - 01:02:23.650

Right. And most shade structures are the, a similar sort of like pipe and, and connector setup. Right. We see it everywhere, all over Playa.

Maybe just before we get too far into it, maybe we can pull up some, some images just so people can get an idea of, of what you're talking about.

Folks that go to Burning man obviously understand what you're, what you're talking about, but sure, sure, maybe it's non burners, but solar aficionados, but I totally agree. And then, you know, one of the questions that's come to mind after that pretty severe windstorm as well, right.

I mean, I'd be curious to, to hear if you how your system held up with that. I didn't hear of any solar panels getting severely blown out.

I heard a lot of tent structures and so on, but I didn't really hear any anybody's solar system getting, getting pummeled.

Marcus De Paula

01:02:25.010 - 01:03:04.130

No.

And frankly it's because of the rigidity of these solar panels and, and also the weight, you know, like residential Solar panels start at £50 and go up to like £70. So there's already just like the element of gravity for their size and they don't like billow.

So you know, when you're comparing it to like tarp that can catch a lot of surface area of wind and have no mass to hold itself down, it's a, it's a totally sort of different equation. And the way that we mounted our solar panels in our system were. I'm going to flip to.

Mark Rabin

01:03:04.370 - 01:03:11.210

Yeah. So this is a similar setup though to the Burning man microgrids. Right? The, the Burning man or has their own solar.

Marcus De Paula

01:03:11.210 - 01:03:56.720

Yeah, yeah. But they use the, they use the T rail and bolts and it's a little bit more permanent of an installation.

This is certainly meant for like a quicker deploy. And they, you know, they have different constraints too. Right. Like the Burning man microgrids are out on open playa.

They're subject to even greater winds and they're out there for four, five weeks sometimes too. So it's much a greater length and a greater exporter. So I can understand. But also people work with what they know too. So here I'm sharing.

Are you able to see the screen? Share?

Mark Rabin

01:03:57.120 - 01:03:57.560

Yeah.

Marcus De Paula

01:03:57.560 - 01:06:00.760

Okay, that's great. Yep. So we're just mounting and laying residential panels over an array of 2 inch aluminum pipe.

And what we've done, we have a couple different arrangements of this, but basically run pipe across shipping containers. So your shipping containers act as your support, at least your end supports. So reduces the amount of pipe that you need to set up there.

It makes it super quick to just lay across. You create a canopy between your shipping containers, center set of support poles and lay the panels on top.

And also so the horizontal arrangement of the panels also reduces the wind exposure. And so when your wind's, you know, cutting straight through, there's not much.

So from a resiliency perspective, this year we didn't have any issues whatsoever with our solar array and it was a big part of what made this year easier for us and we could dedicate our efforts elsewhere. And this is year, because this is year three. We've experienced rain, we've experienced wind.

And having a completely solar driven power system has made it so we don't have to depend on fuel trucks for a generator or. Right. We don't have to wait for a generator to be delivered.

This year because the windstorm and the rain was early in the week, people didn't get their equipment delivered until later. So we were very self reliant. Right.

This is like Also sort of parallels to the real world, where to be self reliant, you're not, you're not dependent on a power company, you're not dependent on other people. So this, the more and more that we can be independent, self sufficient, the.

It just like is exponential in the fruit that it bears for us as a camp when every minute matters in our energy and our available.

Mark Rabin

01:06:01.400 - 01:06:05.880

So no backup generation then, no backup generator.

Marcus De Paula

01:06:07.080 - 01:08:19.130

We carry, you know, we carry a couple little Honda 2000s just because the Playa is so cruel that you, if you bring up, you know, a backup plan, then hopefully you don't need it. But you know, we also have redundancy in all our systems.

So the, our system's completely modular where we have a couple inverters and we have nine racks of 15, 15 kilowatt hour groupings of three batteries that make up the nine, the 15 kilowatts of power in each Turing case. I'll send. Let me jump to a picture of that. Yeah, so standalone structure. So this is, yeah, so this is a different arrangement that we had last year.

We're playing around. We're like, what can we build with this pipe system? What are different shapes that we can make? What are the different arrangements?

How much harder is it to make a custom shape versus just spanning between shipping containers or having a standalone upright and crossbar system? Then this is here on the left side. This is a three phase system that we configured for the mutant vehicle charging station.

So each inverter acted as a single phase. So we're playing, we have all these components that, all these legos, right?

And we're like, okay, you just can mix and match them and turn them into all sorts of different stuff, which is great. And for this, this past year, we really needed it.

We went in with a plan, we went in with a plan to build this again and we didn't because of the rain and the wind and our camp showing up late because of getting hard time getting in, because of we, you know, having to focus on core infrastructure before doing some extras.

We decided just to stick with weighing things across the canopy and continuing the build across the canopy as just like, let's get up as much power as easily as possible. And so having that flexibility to make a change in decision and design on the fly was also like hugely valuable. So we were concerned.

Mark Rabin

01:08:19.210 - 01:08:33.770

Heavy equipment, right? You don't need heavy equipment either to do this. And I think that's other than moving the shipping containers in, right?

This, this didn't, this just requires ladders and, and Some basic understanding of how pipe and clamps go together.

Marcus De Paula

01:08:34.490 - 01:09:58.340

Yeah. So, okay, here's a close up of like the. The touring cases with the batteries.

So these are just like off the shelf home insulation batteries on the left here. We did stacked them three. We kept it this size because these are about 100 pounds per rack component. So this is 300 pounds in this case.

And that between two people is like the max, like anyone can carry by themselves. Because we also didn't want to be dependent on heavy machinery.

So trying to keep everything movable by two or three people and build by two, three people was also like one of the core principles of design here.

And then you can see like, yeah, how we integrated the connections on the sides and doing so in a cost effective manner to keep the overall cost of this system low, but also durable and, and easily like reconfigurable too.

So it's like, oh, we want to deploy a small micro grid over here, or hey, we're breaking down our whole camp and we end up moving our sort of operations center under this tent over there. Great. Let's just like grab a rack of batteries and an inverter and then we can plop the microwave right on top of it and that becomes the kitchen.

And so.

Mark Rabin

01:09:59.380 - 01:09:59.740

Yeah.

Marcus De Paula

01:09:59.740 - 01:10:00.340

How many of these.

Mark Rabin

01:10:00.580 - 01:10:01.780

These boxes did you have?

Marcus De Paula

01:10:02.660 - 01:10:16.740

So we brought this year nine of the battery boxes, which was 135 kilowatt hours of battery. And then we have the. This one 18 KPV. And then we have like basically four of these 6,000.

Mark Rabin

01:10:17.060 - 01:10:23.220

Right. So this is just inverter box. So you had separate inverter box and battery box.

Marcus De Paula

01:10:24.180 - 01:11:48.600

Yeah. But then what we also had was a hub that was basically a bus bars in a touring case with a bunch of outlets. So we could 48 volt because. Yeah, so.

So you can just like plug in everything together and you share the AC and you can share the batteries and becomes one big battery bank and become one big AC system. So then all the capacity just expands to the aggregate amount of any of all the individual components plugged in.

And this worked really well because we wanted to have a system that could grow with us throughout the week. On Playa, you're like, I just need to get. I need something now. Right? You're like, okay, great.

We can start with one battery box and one inverter plugged right into each other. And that immediately gets us power.

But it's just, maybe it's just who and I for the first three days on Playa that works and then a couple more people start to show up and it's great.

Let's put up a few solar panels, let's do the first solar array and let's plug in a couple more battery banks and as we get more people and have more time available or more man hours available, we build the rest of the system. So, you know, that way we can have like this sort of growing of our city and growing our system going together.

Mark Rabin

01:11:49.240 - 01:14:39.080

I love it. Guys, thank you so much for your time today and your insight into this, this excellent work that you're doing.

And just I, I love, I love this, this, even this one on the side here on the, on the right side, this, this solar shade. And I think we're going to see more and more solar shade on Playa and yeah, love it. Yeah, Keep up, keep up the good work guys.

And, and thanks again for, for sharing your insights. All right. Hey everybody, thank you for making it to the end of this podcast. Burning Man 2025 edition.

I just have to say that I am constantly energized and humbled and inspired by these incredible innovators.

And you know, you can see it and you can feel it like the amount of care and lack of sleep and just, just how much energy it takes to get equipment out there onto the Playa and make sure it works. No downtime. And they all nailed it. They nailed it.

Even with all the crazy winds and the rain and the heat and the dust and so yeah, kudos to everybody and thank you so much for your generous time. Yeah, what a, what a year. I'm really looking forward to seeing what's going to come in 2026.

You know, the org is, is really pushing hard to, to get solar and batteries and other solutions out there to reduce the carbon footprint and reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

And it's, it's only accelerating and every, every year I go, I'm seeing like an exponential increase in solar panels. People are cluing in that they can literally save money by not paying for fuel. So lots of good stuff going on and also lots of hybrid.

We're going to see like a battery with a generator next to it. We're going to see micro grids like we showed today.

Going to see all types of different styles of innovation because it's not every camp that needs a huge 300 kilowatt solar array. You know, it's like you can do a lot with a small battery and a small solar panel.

There's even air conditioners now that are just super low power draw that you can really air condition your yurt or your shift podcast. Yeah. Anyway, awesome. I thank you everybody for, for being a part of this and thank you for watching this.

And, yeah, hopefully this inspired you all to start to tinker around with solar and batteries and try to make your camp green, greener. And, yeah, we'll see you next time.