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Chris Kong's avatar

Really explained the business model well...great piece.

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Ryan McIntosh's avatar

Great write up Packy. Love the energy trading play and oversizing the batteries to enable that. Would be worried about how many groups are going after that arbitrage and what that does to the economics. ie If more batteries are charging during off peak times that time slot becomes a peak time of sorts and utility prices will adjust to all that demand from hungry batteries since they are a load.

Also would imagine their BOM costs going up with the tariffs, especially for the batteries and also soft costs with demand for electricians going parabolic and construction costs rising.

The last issue would be the grid interconnection backlog. It’s getting up as high as 7 years in some places. Approvals for a handful of residential installs at a time might be more straightforward but as they start deploying tens of MW of distributed batteries at a time they’re now in the same category as utility scale and will be up against the same interconnection issues, i’d imagine. This is a big reason why behind the meter power solutions are getting so popular.

If they can solve those issues they might have something here.

We’re in a similar boat at Cedar Labs with Vulcan - our behind the meter oxycombustion turbine system for energy intensive facilities. We start BTM and as we scale our distributed fleet we’ll open up our assets for utility use

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