The Wisdom Wall

“Everyone's taking on an enormous amount of gas risk right now with all the new gas generation being built. Gas risk in the sense of gas is a volatile commodity in terms of price. Gas supply lines can be interrupted. If the EPA cracks down on emissions regulations in the future, there's a lot of regulatory risk on gas,…”

“In fact, those are in many ways the same problem. Like, and you can't say that you've solved the electrochemistry until you're making it at a relevant scale You know, relevant, uh, throughput, with relevant yields, with relevant costs. Like, that's when you know you're done, I don't want to say done, that's when you…”

“in all of history, we've never really had a true energy transition. We've just had energy additions, and the president of the S&P, and also awesome fossil fuel historian and energy thinker, Daniel Yergin, Says this a lot, right? Like we've only ever had additions. So renewables coming online is taking up a portion of…”

“I've heard anecdotally the words clean, sustainable climate are automatic kind of triggers for negative response, but American independence, kind of domestic resilience, um, competitiveness, you know, strengthening the grid, helping make, um, Are, are systems stronger to be able to, you know, sustain more production?…”

“What we found looking at over 300 projects, 350 projects in the past couple of years, is the fact that the companies that actually deploy their own technology and follow that path Are the ones that get to success. There are companies that have spent two or three years in the licensing route, where at the end, the…”

“our contention is that capital is an issue, but the biggest issue is the skill set that is required to be able to help the companies see a risk and really assess the risk of that big construction operation of first of a kind.”

“It's super hard to finance something that big As a first of a kind. In fact, it's hard to finance as a second or a third of a kind too. It, it doesn't get easier until you've probably built four or five of them.”

“the main mistake I see early stage founders making is that as soon as they think they're ready to raise, they start, they go out to VC. And they're not thinking about the long game when they do that. Because there's only a certain amount of money that you're going to be raised from VC that's, before it translates into…”

“The reality here is that everybody in this space that's in the finance, ah, realm wants to be second. Once, once they see it working once, they're going to be there. I have no doubt on that”

“The 10 X step, though, easier engineering was going to take just as long as getting to a hundred X because our lead time was defined by system components. When you purchase an electrical box or purchase a pump or purchase a, A component that has a long lead time, you can't deliver the whole system until after it comes,…”

“Without customer involvement, this net zero business is dead on arrival.”

“It's important for this sector to stop acting like it's alternative. When you're 80% of everything being deployed every year, sometimes 90%, politics is part of this. So are regulations, so are lots of other things. Like, people have to make sure that they understand what it means to be a dominant industry in this…”

“One, Everything needs to be opt out. This notion that we need to spend 700 dollars to, like, talk to people and beg them to opt into something is looney tunes. Like, when you, when you hook up something, it's automatically opted into a VPP, and then we should give you an unsubscribe link, just like your emails, and…”

“In order for this to be successful long-term though, they have to figure it out securitization. And that, I think, is the biggest challenge, because a lot of these folks like doing weird stuff, and if you do too much weird stuff, then that loan will sit on your balance sheet forever, because no one will buy it from…”

“And I think we tend to overestimate a little bit the share of technologies that are really fully viable because we do tend to be based in, in, in geographies where we have a lot of support systems. And because we tend to work with companies who are early adopters with willingness to pay.”

“What was happening is you had a lot of businesses shutting down their own very inefficient data centers that were using multiples of the amount of electricity that a hyperscale data center would use. And the hyperscale data center could absorb that with, with significantly less, uh, electricity consumption. For, for…”

“both the things can be true that a company could be a hundred percent zero carbon by one measure, and a utility is building gas plants to support their load, so, and that's the problem, right? The carbon accounting rules don't necessarily connect the dots in a way that really drive accountability, you know, where it…”

“the utility business model of compensating CapEx spending with maybe a seven to nine percent, uh, margin and passing through OPEX at cost to the consumer does not give utilities the right incentives to choose low-cost options such as VPPs”

“in places like, say, South, South Korea, the folks who design The nuclear plant and build the nuclear plant are also the same people, in many cases, are the same people who operate and maintain the nuclear plant, and all of their incentives are aligned, and there's an integrated construction from design through the…”

“The skill of the forecast is surprisingly low on the list of priorities when transmission system operators are buying forecasts. So it's more about how understandable is it? How reliable are you? Do you have a track record? Can you deliver the forecast in this arcane format that works with their ancient computer…”

“Because for Putin, oil is about money, and natural gas is about geopolitics.”

“what you end up doing is stacking a lot of hardware defined limited investments on top of each other. And you end up with a grid that's not Modernizing quick enough. It's expensive because ultimately in the bigger picture, that's a more expensive way to do things than to generate a software update.”

“A-one-two-three systems was supposed to represent the next generation of U.S. manufacturing. Instead, it showed how America excels at inventing new energy technologies, but not building them.”

“the combustion of any kind of fuel that was gonna be, um, unacceptable if, if we were gonna be reaching the kind of, um, goals of, you know, that the science was telling us we needed to reach to, uh, you know, to keep the planet from warming, uh, by more than 1.5 degrees centigrade”

“Well, you can have enough batteries, uh, if you have enough land to do a day or so, but it's the recharging of the batteries the next day that gets you in trouble. That's the same thing the state experienced during the last, uh, heat waves the last summer. They said we had a lot of batteries save the day. Well, they…”

“The experts who are researching this stuff are, are well-meaning and, and well-intentioned and are, are attempting to be very careful, but even with those, uh, safeguards that they're trying to impose on themselves, they are not going to have control over how this technology actually operates in the real world.”

“I mean, the main danger is that it inhibits the very real research that we need, because people are too alarmed from the whole topic, or they just write it off, and then the scientists, who I hope would be doing the good work on this, can't continue their work.”

“The sign of the long decline is when these large corporations say, um, investing in, in really expensive R&D that takes 10 years to come To real fruition, uh, is no longer worth doing, um, is, is really that sign you're looking for, and I think all of the majors, as well as the big oil field service providers, have now…”

“The reason that we see this disparity among black, um, people who have, uh, delivered, uh, prematurely or, um, stillbirth or term, uh, low birth weight, um, Is because of environmental racism. We really see, uh, higher levels of these exposures that we studied among black and brown communities in general. Um, the…”

“It's a national security issue because when people have to leave devastated areas and move elsewhere, the refugee flows, the, uh, all the humanitarian effort that goes into it, the willingness of some people to take advantage of those people, Uh, terrorists in particular and recruit from them because they're, they feel…”

“So there's a multi-decade process of transition where the cheapest suppliers of hydrocarbon might actually produce a larger share of the pie, even though it's a shrinking pie, they're producing a larger share of it, and they have more influence, and that influence may not wane until the pie gets really much smaller.”

“a lot of the early work decades ago was you would get individual microbes and And you would put them together and try to make your own communities. And that never works.”

“These heap leaches that we're talking about, they are multi-billion dollar assets that have to run every day, so if an external party's innovation adds two points of recovery, that's nice, but if it disrupts the heap, Someone's quarter is destroyed. Someone's career might go with it because they're not hitting their…”

“If a strategic investor is also your customer, then every roadmap conversation sometimes can have a second agenda. You have to be very careful about if you're sharing information with other customers”

“You can add domestic supply without new permitting, which makes it the fastest lever that the country has.”

“The problem is that, like, there's a lot of misalignment of incentives in a lot of those conversations, and, you know, a VC who sees the opportunity for greater allocation in a business that they're interested in, obviously is going to want to take that allocation rather than have them take all their money.”

“The notion that a financial instrument kills a company is false. Founders kill companies, and boards kill companies. The people who hold responsibility are the decision makers in the company.”

“they didn't really want another piece of equipment to make fertilizer on the field, and so while that is an elegant and kind of exciting tech vision, it's, it's not customer focused.”

“what popped out of that analysis was very clearly, if you can make a battery for a hundred, for 20 dollars a kilowatt hour, you get the hundred hours and you have a very entitled place to bring a ton of value to the grid. It is differentiated. It enhances the value of all the rest of the systems in there, and it makes…”

“as much as I love biology, we can't deploy it for every single solution. Chemistry wins a lot.”

“And though we make a lot of, we talk a lot about Valley of Death, I think one of the challenges in our Valley of Death in the Series B and C funding is that we've invested in a lot of stuff and haven't told the story to help generalists understand it. And as a result, the limited pool is not just limited by the limited…”

“as it relates to lobbying and language, what might be more important than what you say in the meeting is the air cover you show up with before you even show up.”

“where there are times to have some expansive argument, and learn to get out of our own way, and not make an omissions argument that bums people out, but instead make an argument about why this is just better, is I think a discipline we need to get used to.”

“If you buy into the iterative process, you don't know what you're going to learn, and so you have to be able to take that information, which sounds simple, but engineers and people, nuclear engineers in particular, like to have everything, like, mapped out, like, in a very linear process as they go through it. It's…”

“The hydrogen, for the sake of hydrogen, doesn't seem to be working. You need to have something that's consuming hydrogen, and you hear a lot of people talk about, you know, the, the future hydrogen market.”

“I think, I think that is the crux of it. There, that we are just watching opportunities go, go by because we're all waiting for the perfect type of capital, when in fact, I think the capital is here. I think it's an organization failure.”

“At the end of the day, the investors that come in at the Series C, Series D, you know, most of the time funding or partially funding, um, first of a kind projects, they really want to see six months or more, or performance.”

“You need to be developing your first of a kind project well before your demo is operating. And certainly before your demo has six months of operational data, because you don't have time basically to wait around an ideal world.”

“many times Off-takes are priced in a way before engineering, you know, failed one, failed two, engineering have been done, and it's based on optimistic CapEx assumptions. Now, when the companies go through the engineering process, and they actually get to a feed, they find out that CapEx is twice as much.…”

“I think the next project is always being built before you see a reasonable set of definitive outcomes from the previous project if you, you know, are really on the entrepreneurial journey.”

“And this is actually, I think, one of the big benefits of an in-office culture, is you just see. It's like, hey, look at that thing over on that desk. Like, I think I could stick that and use that as my power supply or whatever. You know, it's like, it's more visible on how you can build another great product out of…”

“The company's not a family. It's a team.”

“If people want to stop a project, they should stop a project with a local permit in the local jurisdiction. They should not be using the federal government to stop projects.”

“when we were negotiating that contract, it was very Explicit to all of us that this was a first commercial system, that this was the first, that, that we'd never done this before, that we'd never delivered a project before. And, uh, some might look at that and say, well, why are you admitting that? And the, the, the…”

“If you're asked to develop something that's price is flat to increasing, when your competitor's price is decreasing every day, you're asked to do something you can't win at.”

“As I said, you can have the best rate design and market it poorly, and nobody will take it. And you're going to have the worst rate design and market it effectively, and everyone will take it.”

“I've been a little less concerned about that, because for computation, you can always be very efficient about your algorithms, and you can make trade-offs from the algorithms. The reason we're more concerned about the data is if you don't have the data, you don't have the data. There's just nothing you can do if you…”

“If you can drive a hundred X scaling, then you can drive 70% cost down. That appears to be a relatively consistent theme, regardless of the maturity of the technology.”

“these are mobile, flexible energy resources, and so their mobility comes first and foremost. It is a device not built for energy purposes. Please deal with the automakers. They will tell you how much they do not care about the energy parts. First and foremost, they want to make sure the trim and the color and the…”

“If you are too innovative, if you can't turn to a standard construction company or EPC, if you can't bring a new technology with suitable guarantees to market, cost of capital that's too high will just kill any renewable energy project.”

“the only time that efficiency is going to Reduce the input needed for any process is when you're starting to exhaust the demand for that resource, right? And, and when you think about something like data, we're nowhere close to satiating human demand for data, which means that if you make it more efficient, you just…”

“When you produce many multiples more waste and pollution than the valuable materials that are recovered, is it really even recycling is the way we look at it.”

“commercializing technology, implementing projects to, you know, to get it out there, that's going to be As hard for any new technology as it has been for wind and solar. So, you know, might as well try to solve it for wind and solar.”

“If rates go up and IPO markets dry up and M&A goes away, we all suffer from that just like everybody else does.”

“My controversial view is there is no right time for everyone to charge. There's only a right time for you to charge. And that you is not driven by just your location in the neighborhood and what time you decide to plug in. It's driven by how you choose to drive your car.”

“It's probably one of the biggest challenges to the DER industry, which is trust from the utility and regulator side on embracing DERs and really accepting them as a reliable, Uh, resource, whether it's for capacity or for localized capacity, um, I think, uh, getting, establishing that trust is, like, one of the biggest…”

“I mean, a lot of people who buy these distributed resources today, um, EVs very much being that, solar, whatever, are generally very wealthy people, and so are we now doing rate design and setting operational constraints based on what the richest 10% want, or are we thinking exactly to what Carlos said earlier, The…”

“The, the kind of dirty little secret is that most of those companies have been saving money too, right? So they've all been, you know, heroes for the climate, but they've also been kind of making money out the back door, buying really cheap energy from guys like me.”

“cement costs are about maybe two, three, four percent of an overall building cost. The cost of labor and the time it takes to build a building are a lot higher than that. You could have a much lower carbon cement, but if it takes three to five times as long to set, which allows you to move on to the next step, it might…”

“it, it's not just a technology game. This is not like investing in SaaS or, um, you know, a traditional tech profile. You have to weave your technology into a broader, uh, framework that really matters, and that means engaging across policy, technology, investment, and advocacy”

“These gas plants that we keep talking about as a sort of a reliability buffer, they've all installed oil fire backup. They have oil tanks on site. Um, so if the spot price for gas gets really high, or the pipeline got constrained, they can switch over. And start burning oil. And what that means when you've got even a…”

“The, the fact that you can get a machine learning algorithm that learns to do something nuanced from data and does it right most of the time doesn't help you in those times when it does something wrong that one time that really blacks out your grid. So this is where kind of machine learning can help you find the…”

“Because if you want really low-cost green power, um, you know, creating jobs with prevailing wages and having apprenticeship programs, you know, there's some tension with that.”

“When you think about what it means to deploy nuclear power into a country, it means an eighty-year relationship with that country.”

“most thoughtful business people will tell you that in any competitive market situation, um, they need to have a backstop, uh, of a, of, of regulation In order to keep a level playing field to make sure that competition is fair, and if you want to make change happen, whether it's anything from, um, having seatbelts in…”

“It turns out that you roughly need a hundred billion dollars of private sector investment to get across the bridge to bankability to full market acceptance, right? Which doesn't save you a gigaton Of carbon, but it gets the technology to a cost-effective point where people are excited.”

“as maybe thinking back to this barometer to evaluate whether an application kind of makes sense, I think a lot of these make sense because they satisfy this key property, which is something that is hard to do, but easy to verify. So ChatGPT and other generative models, what they're really doing is Kind of learning some…”

“That's profit that's built into shareholder expectations. Now you're asking them to shut that down. That creates a lot of uncertainty. Is the regulator going to continue allowing me to earn on an asset that's no longer operating? Like the regulatory standard is used and useful. That's not a used and useful thing. So it…”

“one of the things we wanted to highlight with this report, again, with the local renewables, is you can potentially reuse the interconnection rights that utilities have at these coal plants and transfer them to new renewables that can get ahead of the queue and not see the same delays as the projects that are trying to…”

“Because it's not just a matter of, hey, yeah, let me hire people, and then, because you have to go with them through training, and so it might take you a month to two months for them to be ready to finally go out on the field, know how to interact with customers, and then they will not know how to, um, execute the job…”

“All of those approaches work. They're all sound, but they have different price points. They have different durability. They have different customers. They have different regulatory frameworks, because they're happening all over the world. They're happening at, in different commercial ecosystems. And so everything I…”

“It's that big, fat, impenetrable wad of, of resistance called middle management that's often thwarted. They're really adept at thwarting change.”

“if we get a hundred years, We can prevent a catastrophe. We may not be able to prevent a disaster, but we can prevent the really nasty situations where people are isolated for weeks and just terrible things happen. So, we can prevent that with a lower level of protection. You don't need to protect against total damage.”

“Well, I don't think batteries, right now, battery storage technology is not necessarily a one-to-one replacement for peakers, right? We don't necessarily have a battery that can run for several days or, you know, twelve-plus hours, and batteries need to recharge, which puts an additional demand on the grid afterwards.”

“There is always a carbon opportunity cost to using land.”

“often interconnecting, as wonky as this is, interconnecting a lot of projects can just make them not pencil out because of the cost of the utilities exact on the renewable energy industry.”

“If we would like to finish home decarbonization by twenty-fifty, we need to be, around twenty-thirty, installing 100% heat pumps.”

“So an important point on this is, uh, heat pumps, when paired with a furnace or other form of backup heat, that's actually increasing consumer choice. Because now you have two different fuels to work with. So you have the heat pump to work with, and you have whatever your form of backup heat is, be that a propane…”

“Um, and so changing HVAC contractor minds is going to be so difficult that I would much prefer just to change what they can buy in the first place.”

“And all CBO needs to do is simply account for those costs. And that would fundamentally change the calculations as to what legislation Is, quote, good or bad for the economy.”

“when it comes to these big tech companies, like Google, for example, like they want to get to net zero. They want to get to a hundred percent renewables. That is like a centralized decision that Google is making for crypto and for cryptocurrency mining in particular, no one's making centralized decisions necessarily.…”

“But this is a passive solar banana farm because we don't have a heating system, and it's cheaper to build that way because you save more construction costs leaving out the heating system than you pay extra. For the efficiency techniques that got rid of the heating system.”

“And so electrolyzers, for instance, while they're off, they're very clearly some great tech out there and, and there may be some breakthrough tech out there, it's not required, right? You can take technology that has been around for quite a while and with some incremental changes and With these low costs of input…”

“When you're trying to scale a development business, you oftentimes wind up chasing, like, the small but very profitable project. And the problem with those is even if, you know, you tell yourself, ah, but there's, there's a scalable opportunity here because there are 10, 20, 50 of these things. You go in there and you…”

“I mean, you don't know where it's going to go. You don't know what sort of What backing they're going to put behind it, you don't know what the consumers are going to end up wanting, and so to say I'm not going to sign up for something could be very, very short-sighted.”

“There's a multi-decade period where the old geopolitics of energy Are layered on top of the new geopolitics of clean energy, and we're going to have to address the risks, challenges, opportunities around both.”

“A clean energy world is, in many respects, going to reduce the geopolitical influence of energy, because it's inherently more local.”

“Not everyone has to care about climate change for us to fix the problem. And that is a wonderful thing because not everyone will care about climate change.”

“And so I don't think people really understand that when you poke out different products that we use that come out of the barrel, like say gasoline, it still doesn't affect the entire barrel.”

“You know, renewables substitute coal and gas in the electricity sector, but basically as a direct primary energy source, renewables right now have nothing to do with oil.”

“You know, between now and the day where we're wholly off this stuff, We're going to need to start very carefully crafting the sum of these two percent solutions that add up to something meaningful, you know, like a 30% cut or a 50% cut in emissions. But that, A, takes work, and B, unfortunately, is often seen as the…”

“From a VC perspective, you're like now combining hardware with biology, With software, like talk about like the double black diamond of a startup, like that's really difficult.”

“And for a drone company operating, and we're going to be more consumptive of seed than taking seed, planting it in, um, trays to be in a nursery, and then growing it into seedling hand planting, far less consumptive of seed.”

“Because of what I just described about mass events and the difficulty in collection, and the, it was highly undervalued because things are, in the forestry space, are a commodity, and being able to take and apply that resource with the seed zones and then being able to grow trees, plant them, and generate carbon…”

“The world does not have a copper discovery problem. We have a copper recovery problem.”

“we also made an early call to stay away from revenue shares on purpose. Part of that is because the second your fee is tied to a percentage of the customer's yield, you're incentivized to argue with them about where that improvement came from.”

“The bugs that are there are not necessarily the same ones as the microbes that are doing things, and if you can't tie that to the chemistry and the mineralogy and the operating parameters, it doesn't actually turn into a lever that you can use.”

“The challenge, though, is that it's still a stepwise way of de-risking and mining. A hundred million dollars today is not going to fundamentally change. I do not believe our ultimate success. If it did change that, we'd be out fundraising for a hundred million dollars, um, but it will enable us to sequence our…”

“In the early days, you know, you, you, you basically just have management fees to cover people, and the idea of, like, investing in software to make the process better is, you're not going to do that until you have much larger AUM, right?”

“they would use equity to pay for work that was Getting reimbursed on a very short cycle, which is a terrible use of equity dollars, so, like, a really expensive way to finance this kind of work. And so credit makes, like, much more sense, right? It's much more capital efficient.”

“venture debt is underwritten against your next venture raise. It's not underwritten against anything else.”

“you, you need really, really reliable, uh, technology that virtually never needs to be serviced for that to pencil out.”

“something as simple as a manifold actually can be a total showstopper.”

“But the pilot is more than just to prove the technology can work. The pilot is your team's opportunity to practice running a factory safely and reliably. And that organizationally, you are ready to build your first-of-a-kind commercial factory.”

“Gosh, honestly, even if you're just an individual, extend runway. Be default alive by any means necessary, however you can, um, and extend runway to three years if possible.”

“If you're trying to turn solar into 24 hour, you need a 16 hour discharge duration, basically to produce power, you know, between the time the sun goes down to the time the sun comes back up.”

“because the process is so long, different Projects will be put into the queue, even though they may or may not be funded, even though they may or may not, you know, know that they're going to be going forward, and so the queue gets very long, and then projects will drop out, which will speed up the queue, you know,…”

“those technology developments, the, the horizontal drilling, driving the cost down of horizontal drilling, as well as multi-stage fracking in a well is exactly what The next generation geothermal needed in order to drive down cost and in order to make it a, uh, uh, an affordable energy mix into the future.”

“I, I've always felt that no policy maker is going to establish a policy that's not feasible because then it just comes back to bite them. So it's on us as the CDR industry to demonstrate that we're feasible and cost effective.”

“With all these, ah, data centers that Everyone wants to have all over the place without tantalum. Forget about it.”

“So if you, if you try to solve all the variables at once, It is going to be very difficult, so you, you, you have to isolate some of the variables, the most critical ones, show that you are able to solve, and then keep improving, right? So that's, that's how you, you need to do, ah, attempts to solve everything in the…”

“So this is not a hockey stick story. This was always a, just a slow moving growth because of the nature of installing This equipment in such rural communities where you don't have easy access to tools.”

“working in associations with other companies is incredibly valuable. We're so used to viewing competition warily, but when it comes to Like, the thermal batteries, and they're all, all of the thermal battery companies can actually bind together and actually help influence Forty-Five-X, which is what Boundary Stone…”

“as it relates to how companies now approach the government, I do think there is a world of storytelling that founders and companies need to do that is social media first. And lose the muscle of, oh, maybe I'll place a story in fast companies. And Fast Company will tell my story, and then I can retweet Fast Company.…”

“The main challenge with new nuclear is really the cost. It's a two-fold problem. It's not just high cost, it's high cost uncertainty, and we're in a particularly kind of perilous moment where people are recognizing the value of the fixed, reliable, base low power that nuclear can provide without the carbon emissions,…”

“in the nuclear space in particular, because there's so few build opportunities, there are a lot of people who just have experience in a very narrow band of that development cycle for the technology. And when you just do that one step, like, 20 times, you're missing so much about the overall cycle”

“when you have the overhead or the investment in the manufacturing capabilities, if you just wait for that operation experience, even at smaller timescales, you have a lot of people just sitting around not really doing anything. So, for us, Basically just have build, build, build, build, build as the thing that happens…”

“Methane pyrolysis is only interesting if you have low cost natural gas, which hasn't always been the case, and if you are concerned about CO two emissions. And both of those factors really only started in about 2015 or so, once the fracking revolution took off, and it was clear that there was this huge abundance of…”

“you need a strong technical leader who can go toe to toe with PhDs or has a PhD themselves to be able to explain this is why we're solving problems in, in this order. And you don't need to worry about that. Until the second of a kind commercial unit. Like, we're worried about the pilot today, and we're going to reduce…”

“you need to really get to a foot in diameter with a fluidized bed before you get away from wall effects. So if you can get to a foot in diameter or larger, you can get away from wall effects and be very confident that you can take the data that comes out of that and scale it to whatever diameter that you want.”

“And now if you're doing distributed, it's a million dollars rather than a billion. So you might have a thousand times the amount of data at every single one of those stages, a thousand models, a thousand, um, uh, PDF documents or contracts, a thousand counterparties. So that's where the overhead really becomes…”

“But I think the other challenge around this asset class is that it's not one utility, right? It's a hundred business owners. It's a hundred nonprofits. It's a hundred YMCAs or churches. And so they're not the typical player in this space that's accustomed to thinking about term sheets, thinking about risk profiles,…”

“And so the two things really missing, right, um, is first and foremost the build of the coordinators, right? Sometimes it's the government, sometimes it's an industry group, other times it's a financial institution or organizations like ours that are really leaning in, trying to bring everyone to the same place to, to…”

“I think in a lot of ways this is harder than A mortgage. I think the blended nature of the capital stack for projects has been really overwhelming for a lot of folks to wrap their, their arms around, so figuring out who owns the risk at what point in the project can be super overwhelming”

“Like, I need a bankable, you know, off-taker, and I need an experienced EPC, right? Like, those are meaningless words in many ways, right?”

“One type of capital cares about risk, and the other type of capital that many of these organizations that I'm talking to, ah, are, are philanthropic or below market rate or Has to align with community impact, and that, that set of capital cares about leverage and impact, and so we're already looking at two different…”

“And I think that one of the things that is really important to recognize in this conversation is that not all assets have to be bundled. Not all of these assets have to get to the secondary markets, has to look identical. Creating standards builds a marketplace for financing to come more easily to this asset because…”

“The way we propose to do this is, you know, that company has to follow a path towards that de-risking, and that path in our, ah, experience is you go from a pilot to a five to 20 x demonstration project, and then you go to another 10, 10, 20 times, ah, first of a kind project.”

“Most of the time, the team has to build it themselves. No EPC contractor really wants to get into this smallish projects, high risk projects, right?”

“And one of the things we point out that our experience shows that the companies that do it, you know, in a sequential way could take, you know, somewhere between three or five years to get to the first of a kind versus, you know, doing it in a lot less time.”

“the second you have a customer who's expecting the product, your incentives are misaligned a little bit because what you really need from an existential company perspective from the demo is to prove the technology and optimize it. What the customer needs is to get their products as they expected to get it. And you…”

“in cement, where it's so short-term, It'd be really hard to get anybody to sign more than a five-year agreement, right?”

“if you're building a first-of-a-kind thing, there's also not really, we've been talking about, like, financing the long-term operation. There's also not really a construction financing solution, so you end up having to do that on balance sheet, and that's a lot of cash.”

“what we've seen is most of these infrastructure investors really play for the platform, right? I'm putting X hundred million dollars in the first project. What I really want to do is put a billion dollars into your next two or three projects, and a lot of them are getting options for those projects, but because what…”

“When you look at the wind and solar industry, those industries are fairly de-risked, And so oftentimes you can, you know, sign a commercial agreement very early on and go finance against that commercial agreement because there's a lot of certainty around the execution of those projects. That is not the way it is in…”

“You can imagine trying to use EMF sensors to isolate the signal from each of those individual conductors and all the complicated map that goes into it. And long story short, that got really messy really quickly and was not kind of an efficient way to get the information that we needed.”

“increasingly the one that we see Most often is around load growth when there's potentially new commercial load growth happening in their service territory. The last thing they want to do is to say, you know, we don't have that capacity. We're essentially turning you away. That's a very bad look for utility.”

“And one of the things that's nice about how utilities think is while they Do tend to move slowly initially. They're also not in competition with one another, which means that when they do find something that works and is repeatable, they talk to one another and they want to know about those successes. And when they see…”

“One thing that we've recognized is that at the end of the day, utilities are not going to adopt something because a pilot was successful in and of itself, nor are they going to adopt it because the technology is interesting or cool.”

“I think the natural adoption within the marketplace, and this is probably true of most utility technologies, is that it tends to start with the bigger ones, and as the ease of deployment and cost starts to come down and all of that good stuff happens, some of the smaller utilities, the munis and co-ops that may not…”

“The approach we've always taken is avoid customization of equipment wherever possible. Use standard off-the-shelf equipment. You know, it can always be configured, so you'd consider that more tooling, but use available equipment that's well-proven, well-demonstrated, With all the bugs and kinks worked out of it,…”

“But really it's the scaling of the market that's, uh, that's been the hardest, and that in hindsight I think we, we could have taken a different approach to.”

“one of the problems with solar is you're really peaky in the middle of the day, but when you add trackers, you're almost flat over the course of the day. And this is a huge deal for building a new kind of grid based on solar.”

“And we were part of this amazing industry, the solar industry, that keeps deciding it's going to lower its costs much faster than anyone could ever predict. So that means we would get to our cost target, and the industry would have already moved way far ahead of that.”

“This is true in commodities like steel and e-fuels because an influential end customer can push the rest of the chain to take a chance on a low-carbon product. It's definitely true here in Cement.”

“The premium that we pay for sustainability in terms of this building being all electric, uh, in terms of the quality of the systems and the nature of the systems that we're already building into the building, uh, makes the cost of the cement, even if it were the entire building, pale in comparison. So the industry has…”

“Most companies are raising a hundred million or two hundred million, which is just about enough to build one thing, and then you're out of money again.”

“When they see that a new sector like batteries is, Is poised for double digit annual growth. They don't want to see all that business go to their rivals. They want to make sure they get on the ground floor too. So there's kind of a chicken and egg thing where they, they don't want to necessarily be the first because…”

“The IRA doesn't work without private parties that are willing to buy these credits, right? The government doesn't actually write us a check.”

“There's plenty of storage around the world, and ultimately, if we want to be negative in our CO₂ removal, we need to be storing it and not reusing it. Otherwise, it's just kind of a circular economy there.”

“as companies look to get to scale, especially in direct air capture, and once you get to like triple digit, or even triple digit millions, or billions of dollars of capex, debt financing, non-recourse financing is, is ultimately going to be needed.”

“So, kind of what we're seeing in the industry at the moment is people are kind of waiting to see that CDR can be deployed before they make the commitments as well. So, it's kind of this vicious cycle.”

“Yeah, the thing that keeps me up most is definitely that first one that you mentioned, the market and the demand, um, because your second one, like you said, the project financing, um, that will come if the demand is there. So, having more businesses, um, beyond those first early adopters, um, of CDR commitments to get…”

“Small projects, unless they're part of a big project portfolio, are very difficult to finance this infrastructure.”

“it's important not to automate manufacturing processes too early because you may lock yourself into a design that You didn't like that, ok, and now you've made it hugely expensive to change that.”

“Taking carbon out of the supply of energy will only work if grid operators have the flexibility with respect to demand to meet this new supply stack that, that utilities are building.”

“residential customers who, you know, ultimately I believe don't think they're buying electrons from their utility. They're buying convenience. I come home. I turn on my lights. I turn on my air conditioner. It works. They're not thinking about how much am I paying for those electrons at all times.”

“Why, why lead with the higher price? Lead with the lower price. I mean, that's like marketing one A, right? But we somehow, because of the cost of service mindset, can't seem to understand it. But all of us, our customers who go to Macy's, Nordstrom's, and Safeway, Learn from that everyday experience and talk in the…”

“And so long peak periods, insufficient price differential, and bad marketing, those are the hallmarks of failure.”

“See, the problem with alerts is they only work a few times. Then it's like the, you know, the kid who cried wolf doesn't have an impact. You have to make it tangible by giving them a monetary payment or charging a higher price.”

“once you start to think of this as a distributed platform, not just a data collection device, this entire world of making use of the data at the edge and AI machine learning at the edge starts to get opened up.”

“Low-resolution data sent up to the service provider, made available, uh, later on, and look, there's some things you can do with that, but you just can't have a real-time, consumer-facing app, and then you can't see the grid in real-time from the edge either.”

“What we've learned since then is that same high-resolution data lets us see, ah, the grid from the edge, lets us see transformers arcing, lets us see vegetation hanging power lines in real-time. That only happens through high-resolution data.”

“There are just these three main topics that I've been talking about, which is getting access to the right data, so high-resolution waveform data. It's well known how to do that. It's mature technology, we know how to do that. Having enough computation so that you can run software in the meters, have it upgradable, and…”

“However, the capabilities and the requirements to move to the next levels of scaling and to do it as quickly as possible, they move very quickly from technical insight and technical capability, particularly scientific insight and scientific capability, into things like You know, broad-based process engineering and…”

“There's plenty of power most of the time. There's, you know, a number of hours a year where we don't have enough power, and so that's really what we're trying to solve for.”

“if you look at the history of the cloud industry, it started with a focus on fiber, right? Get as close to the network as possible. That's why you have concentrations in places like Northern Virginia and Amsterdam, because those were some of the biggest network hubs in the world. Um, then it really became about GDP and…”

“it is important to be realistic about, like, the pace of adoption of basically anything in transmission, especially. It's measured in years or decades. It's not faster than that.”

“The bridge between the distribution operations team and the customer teams, that is coming. You know, that bridge is being built very quickly, and EVs are at the center of that, and I think you cannot actually build it without machine intelligence, because fundamentally a grid operator cannot be sitting there hitting a…”

“the more you can break those data silos within any enterprise organization, the more value that machine learning gives you, and I think part of the reason that AI has not been as Exciting to a lot of power sector clients is the silos have existed for far too long, right? You got 18 different systems, each of which…”

“If you are Going to continue to operate in the sort of traditional paradigm of the grid side looks at the grid, and the customer side looks at customers. We're never going to make the kind of progress and scale the way that we want to.”

“we learned that you can move electricity a thousand miles, you can move steam a thousand meters.”

“There are very few cases in which you can produce hydrogen that's renewable and make it cost-effective for reliable delivery without having twenty-four-seven operations.”

“So something specific I've seen work very well is to embed teams of data scientists and software engineers with the lines of business. So to make sure that somebody who is a data scientist is actually sitting with a trader for a week, or sitting with the grid management team for a week, or sitting with line crew for a…”

“A one million-dollar deal is more simple than a Billion dollar deal, but not a thousand times less. It still has its own contracts, counterparties, models to deal with all of that.”

“Because the, the thing that I think people that work in this industry understand, but most people don't understand, is when a utility says that they don't have power, they don't mean that most of the time there's not power. They just mean there might be a handful of hours a year where there's not power. So they can't…”

“People misunderstand the word virtual to mean, you know, not real. When these are hard assets on the grid, it's not phone calls anymore. It's software integrations, and it's large aggregations of small resources that really add up to something very valuable.”

“I think when you have virtual power plants bidding into wholesale markets and earning a price that represents the value to the bulk power system, It's an incomplete price, because it's not taking a, it's not taking account of the value to the distribution grid.”

“Unfortunately, from a scientific standpoint, the most valuable thing to AI is the two examples. But you know that those scientists did not just do two experiments. You know that those scientists did months and months and months of work and refinement and failed dozens of times to get a result that they thought they…”

“there is no best cathode. There is no best anode. There is no best electrolyte. You need to build the system that they are all compatible with each other to make the best battery.”

“When we're looking at companies that are making a commodity product, I want to look back 10 or 15 years at the commodity price. I don't want to invest against a two-year spike in something. You know, that's what a lot of people did in the polysilicon boom in 2010. I think that's what a lot of people did in the lithium…”

“They just don't realize how hard it is to build stuff, to build, to make new factories. This is a fundamental difference between climate tech and software.”

“There's, there's, like you said earlier, a bigger push for profitability near term, and more of a, like, it has to be really special to be excited about starting a journey that is going to take a billion plus dollars to scale.”

“One of the challenges is that the Inflation Reduction Act is supply-side policy. It reduces the price. It doesn't create demand. It doesn't say, you know, you're going to have to pay, um, a penalty if you continue using gray hydrogen.”

“I think it's entirely possible to use artificial intelligence, to use, ah, layered data sets to predict. In the same way that we get notifications that we're pre-qualified for a loan or a higher credit card rate, we're pre-qualified for income-eligible financial assistance or clean energy programs. And for customers…”

“there are really, really low barriers to entry in this business and really, really high barriers to actually successful exit.”

“we were seeing these integrations take five, seven years. And then if every utility kind of goes at the pace we were going at, and then says, well, we're going to build our DERMs over the next five years. I just started adding up the numbers. I was like, we're going to blow past the timelines that we need to hit to get…”

“outcomes, business insights, they're a function of compute in close proximity to data. Like, compute in close proximity to data is where you're going to get the results that you're really looking for.”

“if you're working on an IRP, you should be looking at a climate model so that you're not building next generation transmission through an area that might be green and wooded today, but in 15 years we expect to be a high threat wildfire zone.”

“I think what we've seen a lot is some very smart, you know, former Google engineers who can write an amazing piece of software, um, but they're, you know, then trying to completely change the way utilities work, but not one member of the team has ever worked in a utility, understands what that's about, has ever sold to…”

“So I think longer term, we have to do something like that because the high rates disincentivize the switch to electrification, which is what we all want is what we need for our energy policy.”

“You can do that a lot more cheaply, it turns out, when you're tapping into stuff that people are buying anyway.”

“I think that's a, that's a trend I see over and over again in the climate solutions world is some problem that seems big and intractable is actually just viewed that way because no one, no one took a serious swing at it yet. And then once you actually try, suddenly, um, the, the traction can kind of like show up like…”

“Well, in offshore wind, in a way, we focused on the production sites, you know, putting offshore winter ones in the water, but There is a grid system. There's an electricity market that we can plug in. So from this perspective, offshore wind was an easy one. You know, um, hydrogen will be more complex.”

“That's really complicated stuff, and in some cases, it's pitting companies or industries that are focused on building stuff here in the United States. Against companies and industries that are focused on putting the stuff that's built in other countries to work in the United States.”

“You can get very far in terms of emissions abatement just with clean power and electrification of end uses alone. That gets you, like, 80, 90% of the way. Then adding carbon capture and storage also gets you much closer. But the final five, six percent or so of emissions abatement that you need to reaching net zero by…”

“And in sectors that have no other alternative to using hydrogen, for example, as a fuel and heavy transport like ships and planes, uh, for steel production, hydrogen is one of the few options to produce primary steel. So it's absolutely essential that hydrogen gets scaled up if you want to reach net zero.”

“we're starting to push past that first phase of the energy transition where we're just bringing, and it Megawatt hours of clean power online, um, and we're not really to the upward bounds of, like, You know, we're not to 50 or 60% renewables yet, but, like, we can sort of see that coming, and it brings all of these…”

“You can't really get cost efficiencies by having bespoke projects. They have to be fairly standardized in the factory environment, in the manufacturing environment. To really drive costs down.”

“if you look at the way that the utility industry does it and has done it for a very long time, it is that averaged approach that they take to, to try and forecast how to build this portfolio of assets to meet the growing demand that they're going to need. And, and if you average, no surprise, you sort of eliminate this…”

“Anything at that scale that you're talking about, it doesn't matter what duration you're picking there for long duration, at that scale, you know, hundreds of gigawatts, there's no realm in which, uh, having something That large, uh, show up on the grid does not involve the government in some way.”

“So we need to now take the next step in investing, and that's not 10% more data capture processing power. That is orders of magnitude more data and processing power.”

“Both the optimist and the pessimist make the same mistake, and that is that they think of the world as something that gets decided for us. They think that the technology is going to do something to us. The reality is that these technologies are tools. In fact, they're more powerful tools than we've ever had before. So…”

“I think one of the things we've learned at Google is jumping right to the, like, 10 X solution doesn't always work. We have X for that. That's kind of the moonshot factory, but for a lot of the sort of core use cases, it's really important to define a bite-sized piece that we can test, iterate, fail fast, move quickly…”

“I think one of the advantages we have today is that we have more solar and wind and energy storage installed. You know, the industries are more mature, and I think that has caught, that has built the political support for industrial policy.”

“I think one of the reasons that cryptocurrency is interesting is because it's interruptible load. And so, you know, the crypto mining facilities are happy to use your low-cost green power and then go offline when it makes more sense to sell that green power. And that doesn't have to be specific to crypto mining. There…”

“Well, we, um, are in a solutions crisis as well as a climate crisis, and, and the solutions are there, but, uh, the crisis is that people don't know about them.”

“covering science and particularly the climate through the prism of a political reporting, which is, you know, well, if you get the Republican, you gotta get the Democrat, and on the one hand, on the other hand, kind of stuff, that that kind of reporting ultimately is wildly inaccurate and gives people all the wrong…”

“other banks are more risk averse on the traditional financial metrics That you do to, to measure the quality of a loan. Um, but Silicon Valley Bank, understanding the startup ecosystem, understanding how these companies grew from a Series C or Series A to profitability in the long run, having been there for years and…”

“So I think a critique that you can make of the clean energy industry, uh, writ large, this is generalizing a little bit, but there's a lot of companies that are very good at tackling these thorny, wonky, Really complicated grid problems, engineering problems, design challenges, and coming up with these really complex…”

“you don't need to overhaul the home entirely. You can, you can take devices people actually have already and, and make some use out of them for the grid. Uh, it's a, it's a more modest goal, and I think more realistic than swapping out the entirety of the built environment for, for something clean and shiny and new.”

“So the hype was highest when the technology was, if you experienced it in person, was just obviously not ready. And yet, as the technology got more and more impressive, even to the point where, you know, I've been on a fully driverless ride on public roads in Arizona in a Waymo, which is Again, like probably the most…”

“We, we do not have the full complement of business and worker skills to deploy. And until we do, we're going to be rate limited by human capital first.”

“It's big engineering. It's not particularly hard engineering, but it is big engineering”

“I think New York City is a good, uh, counter example to the, the sort of vision of the clean energy future that's all small scale, and every, every home just puts it on the roof because, you know, you have too many people living in very tall buildings that don't have the roof space relative to the, the actual occupants…”

“In many other places, certainly in New York City where I'm based, uh, rooftop solar batteries is a nice-to-have. In Puerto Rico, it's a need-to-have. You need to refrigerate your insulin. You need to power your nebulizer. Um, you need to stay connected and charge your phone because an emergency is unfolding.”

“It's really hard to study the connection between diet and health outcomes. And we just don't have good tools to do it.”

“when the heat dome settled over the northwest, people were still being told to kind of hunker down, to avoid social contact, to isolate, to protect themselves, and so there the dilemma was that isolation was both a way to protect yourself from the pandemic and a way to imperil yourself in the face of extreme heat.”

“Most people are more likely to respond more positively and answer the phone for people that they know and know are checking on them, so And, and people that they trust specifically.”

“Cooling centers are doomed to failure if they're, you know, bland high school gyms in places that people would never spend time on a typical day. You'll only go there if you're forced to go there, basically, if you're forced to evacuate your home, because it's uncomfortable, it's unpleasant, it's unfamiliar.”

“and actually reducing methane helps them make more money in the end, because they're, they'll have more usable gas.”

“the good news about electric vehicles is they have far more in common with solar than they do with efficiency. Folks can see them, and they can see that they have been normalized and understand that it is not a risk to actually start to electrify transportation.”

“climate is at its core a capital stock turnover problem where we need to deploy Ultimately, pretty low-cost capital. The corpus of it needs to be in order to turn over our brown infrastructure and make it green.”

“the U.S. does not have a very robust supply chain for batteries domestically, but to the extent that we can recycle the batteries that we are using, that creates a secure domestic stream, uh, that can then be used to build batteries in the future.”

“You will also relieve the installation bottlenecks not having enough skilled installers to put a bunch of heat pumps in quickly if you focus first on apartment houses, commercial buildings, the things that have big furnaces and boilers burning a lot of Russian gas, but a much smaller installation burden with, you know,…”

“When, uh, Europe gets in a bidding war with Asia for cargoes of LNG in the short run, that means that Japan and China and so on see the same price as in Europe. So they are equally incentivized to save oil, gas, gas-fired electricity.”

“And that people-centeredness is an important component because it also is something that can be, like, more motivating than just talking about decarbonization and carbon tax and, I guess, abstract and more scientific concepts that doesn't really relate to how, you know, these factors are experienced day to day.”

“Opportunities then for these charging stations to essentially participate as, you know, wholesale power plants, right? Uh, providing storage services to the grid, that sort of thing.”

“So you kind of create these structures that protect certain groups, but then Other groups become more exposed as a consequence of the way that the structures are designed.”

“And that kind of muscle memory and auditory cue, uh, becomes part of your identity in, in a really significant way. And I think that is at play also with the big diesel trucks in many rural states is that engine kind of clanking away in the background, kind of chugging along. It's reassuring. It's, it sort of shows…”

“You know, you can predict with fairly high confidence at certain temperature levels what the physical risks will be on the planet, right, from climate change, sea level rise, extreme weather events, uh, temperatures, heat waves, but what you can't predict as much is what humans will do in response.”

“really we're in a different place where the intelligence community needs to bring in those climate scientists, not to share what the IC knows about the world, but what those climate scientists know about how the world is changing and, and help the intelligence community integrate that into their work.”

“with climate, I mean, we have models that will show us five, 10, 15 years down the road at different temperature levels, what to expect. And so those predictive capabilities are a huge power that we have and tool for us to use in, in the security community.”

“I think the most significant Dimension of geopolitical influence that comes from energy is not only the amount of production, but the swing supply capacity, the ability to ramp production up or lower it very quickly.”

“if they start pressuring countries to really hold true to their promises, Then they might turn off the already dwindling number of host countries that are willing to put on these events.”

“And to get away from that and to start relying on renewable energies, it doesn't just take, uh, you know, a technical fix. It's sort of a bureaucratic issue. You got to rework departments. There are regions of the country that have been relying on this for growth. I mean, huge regions. We're not talking like a couple…”

“It's so big and so distant and so kind of all-encompassing and abstract that it's very difficult to approach it via a specific place or person or story or relationship, and those specifics are what give art its power and its meaning.”

“if you tell people, I made a movie about climate change, they're not going to herd to see it. They're just not.”

“We're evolved creatures who are evolved to care about things within a certain space around us and on a certain timescale, right? We're just mammals. That means close proximity and relatively short timescales. And climate is huge and far away and slow.”

“It is the most effective non-precious material for transmitting electrons, and so every time we think about grid stabilization, electrification, or things like AI data centers, the copper backbone underpins all of it.”

“When the risk-free rate went from zero to five whole percent, Every long duration asset gets repriced, and climate tech is the ultimate, unfortunately, the ultimate long duration category. A company that needs 10 or even, um, you know, 20 years to reach meaningful revenue is worth a lot less in a five percent rate…”

“a reforestation project may have a much longer, naturally would want a longer term because if you look at tree growth cycles, you'd have carbon credit generation over a long period of time. Whereas an infrastructure style BEX project kind of needs a fixed, you know, And you have, there's a thick shape to it. You know,…”

“One of the hardest things, and one of the many hard things in a startup, is once you have your technology working at a level that you believe to be adequate, is taking that technology out and building your first commercial plant. Because the perception of risk is there in the eyes of whoever might finance. Plus, you…”

“There are very few vendors that want to build pilot scale pieces of equipment. They're an order of magnitude bigger than things that are built for labs. They're an order of magnitude smaller than pieces of equipment That are built for refineries. So, all the balance of plant stuff, and I think this is true of any…”

“The way it works is that the first time they drill That well always takes the longest. They don't know anything about the rock, the area, etc. So those wells always take the longest, they're the most high cost, but then over time, the cost to drill wells in that field, as the learnings increase, drops precipitously.”

“geothermal, unlike wind and solar, where you can measure it by observing surface conditions, you have to know about the subsurface resource in order to have high confidence that you can go build a geothermal facility in a place.”

“for a thing at the scale we're making at a hundred megawatt electrolyzer plant, uh, the sales cycles are very, very long, um, because they're tied to project development Life cycles and project development at this scale can take anywhere from three to five years.”

“solar is a supply chain business, and we were one tiny part of this supply chain business.”

“a 50 kilogram brick is almost perfectly the wrong size. It takes two people to handle it, and there are a lot of them. So to the extent that we could make larger single bricks, we could reduce crane operations or people hours building these things.”

“It is, it's very low impact, and, and you can install these things very quickly, I mean, you're not reconductoring. You're not running new lines. You're, you're simply outfitting existing infrastructure with sensors. Uh, this can happen really quickly.”

“All that said, this is a really hard industry, and I know we're going to get into this, but you know, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, choosing nuclear as your technology is literally choosing hard mode.”

“Which is all to say that NWPs, whilst they do a great job of predicting things like humidity and temperature, converting that to a really detailed map of where the clouds are is known to be fairly imperfect at the moment.”

“anyone who's, you know, familiar with manufacturing, you know, it's a lot tougher than like, oh, hey, I just wrote an app, and now I'm generating some revenue or something. You basically invest billions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars up front And then in order to actually make a return on that…”

“What's exciting about expanding the manufacturing base, um, in the U.S. is, uh, that, um, you know, you now can perhaps site renewable power projects in locations that you couldn't before, because there was no economic activity there before, and you were taking the risk that you could produce low-cost power But there…”

“So a hedge is an expense until it saves your ass.”

“the logo on it is, is governed by IP law. Anything that goes into the manufacturing sourcing of the materials, its fabrication triggers international law and tariff regulations. It triggers employment law and labor law in how and where and under what set of circumstances and conditions laborers are working. Any part of…”

“And it turns out in a heat wave that knock on the door can make the difference between life and death because it's not that hard to protect someone from a heat wave. They just need to get exposed to cool water or air conditioning. You know, if you get to them early enough”

“And, you know, you'll lose some of that electricity in the round trip conversions to store it and bring it out. So you're actually, like, more carbon-intensive if you're storing carbon-intensive electricity.”

“and actually cooking on the back burners is where it's most effective.”