Texas energy grid challenges and solutions with Base Power’s Justin Lopas | E1960

0:00Yeah, Jason, I think if you look over time, over the history, energy use has just gone up. Right. And if you also look, there's a really interesting chart online that I'm happy to share, but is of GDP per capita of a country versus its energy availability, how much energy it has. And what you'll find is there's a direct correlation between these two. More energy, higher GDP per capita. This is really the sort of fundamental thing here is how do we increase the availability of energy such that we can increase human prosperity? I think that's it's fundamental to so many industries. Obviously, the recent advances in AI, but transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, my background, it's all it's all sort of derivative of energy.

0:42And if we can solve the energy problem, we can we can build a lot more really cool stuff. this week in startups is brought to you by open phone create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop twist listeners can get an extra 20 off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist squarespace turn your idea into a new website go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers.

1:30Get 15 % off your first four weeks of developer time at Lemon.io slash TWIST. All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. Today, we're going to talk about a startup that wants to put a battery in every home, making power outages a thing of the past. And this doesn't require you to install solar panels on your roof. Justin Lopez is the co-founder and COO of Base Power. And they're making sure that when the grid goes down, your power doesn't. Justin, welcome to the show. Hey, Jason. Thanks a bunch for having me. Really appreciate it. My friend, Bestie Brad Gerstner, had told me about your startup.

2:09You're based in Texas, yeah? That's right, Austin. in austin the just one of my favorite cities of all time uh and you've raised a bunch of money i see you did a 68 million dollar series a my friend antonio from valor equity partners is involved altimeter as i mentioned brad gerstner is involved um in texas we have been seeing over and over and over again uh that the grid fails uh so maybe you could tell me a little bit about how your solution works who pays for the batteries and then what impact that'll have in a place like texas where we keep seeing these weird um i guess you guys have had like i don't know if it's snow or just frost or really cold temperatures and all the cables break is that what's actually happening there kind of like the wind here in uh california is knocking down poles and then people just turn off the electricity the electric company just turns it off because they don't want to start fire so tell me about what's going on in texas and then how this all works yeah jason so um yeah it's a really interesting time to be in the texas energy ecosystem uh i don't know if you've followed recently this is just a few days ago but actually a big storm came through houston that knocked out power for actually over a million people at the peak um most of which in the houston area uh this This is like one in 13, one in 14 electric customers in the state didn't have power at a time.

3:34So this is really timely. To your exact point, the Texas grid is a really interesting place. It is actually a grid that is islanded to the state. So there are three grids in the US. There's the western, there's the eastern, basically split roughly by the Rockies, and then there's Texas. And Texas is actually its own physical grid, sort of like Hawaii is where it's an electrical island. And so all of the energy that is consumed in the state needs to be generated in the state and vice versa. And the challenge that the Texas grid is facing is not only just weather, like what we saw in Houston over the last few days, or you're referencing winter storms of the past handful of years that have knocked out power.

4:16But it's also, it is becoming a imperative for the Texas grid to be able to take on the increasing volatility of supply for renewable generation. So the Texas grid is an island, like I said, and it is also has the most renewables on the grid compared to any other state. So there's a ton of solar and a ton of wind here in Texas. How did Texas become the leader in renewable energy? That's kind of a strange thing. We should pause on there for a second because you would think in oil country, you'd be burning oil. but in the great state of texas you are leading in renewables and maybe you could just tell us a little bit about the um ascension of solar and wind uh in texas so there's there's kind of two things that are happening to confluence a lot of renewable generation here in texas uh there's this this concept of the wind corridor kind of the center of the u.s and then there's the sun belt right which is the southern part of this of kind of the southern belt of states uh and texas is in both of those locations right uh so there's a ton of solar um ability for solar to be installed in the west part of the state and a lot of uh wind in the southern part of the state in texas not only is its own grid but it's also a heavily deregulated energy market which i'd love to spend some time on with you jason and kind of how that works but what that essentially means is that there's a much easier and faster and more free market approach to generation coming online.

5:51And so there's basically a split between those that generate the electricity and those that deliver the electricity, which doesn't happen in other states. For the most part, like where you're at in Northern California, you have PG &E that owns the whole stack. Here in Texas, the stack is split up by regulation. And so that allows more sort of free market principles, aka renewables, which are typically cheaper than coal and natural gas to come on onto the grid and that's another moment to pause here as incredible as it seems building a new solar farm i guess farm installation i don't know what we call them these days farm yeah yeah building a solar farm my understanding for my friend phil deutch is that building one of these solar farms is cheaper now than forget about building a coal plant even like refreshing a coal plant and you know maintaining it is now becoming more expensive than just installing solar.

6:45This is true, yeah? Totally true. And you know, it's funny, renewables used to be, there used to be a green premium associated with renewables, right? It would cost more to have cleaner generation or consumption, the EV would cost more than the gas car, etc. That is really no longer the case, especially on the grid. And so you'll see a lot of the, you know, you're referencing kind of Texas oil country, you'll see a lot of the oil and gas companies and folks in that ecosystem are actually investing in and participating in renewable generation just because it's simply cheaper and more economical.

7:19And they know the business. It's like the business of selling energy is complex, even in a place that's deregulated. So if a person wants to build a solar farm and then sell that energy, they can connect to the grid. The grid is controlled by somebody, some authority that then allows people to add supply to it. Is that correct? Yeah, that's right. So let's talk a little bit about how the Texas grid works. So there's a nonprofit entity called ERCOT, that's the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. And they are responsible for managing the grid. They don't own generation, they don't own poles and wires, and they can't sell you electricity, but they're responsible for kind of calling the shots.

8:00They've got a control center that looks sort of like a NASA mission control, so to speak. And those guys who are like operating the grid and they're also operating this marketplace. You can kind of think about them as the New York Stock Exchange of Energy here in Texas. So if I have a solar panel or if I have a battery like we have and I want to bid that energy into the market, I go through ERCOT and ERCOT matches me with a buyer. And so they basically do all the financial settlements. So ERCOT manages it. And then there are three kind of distinct areas of ownership throughout the grid. So there's those that generate the power.

8:35There's those that own the poles and wires, like the things that you see, transformers or substations. And then there's those that sell the power. And so we at Base Power are one of those that sells the power. And we also, through our batteries, kind of have a generation source, right? Because when they're discharging, we're generating power that's either supplying the home in the event of an outage or in a high priced environment, or we're pushing back onto the grid. And the way that Texas has set up its energy market is those that own the poles and wires. Those guys are a sort of regulated monopoly.

9:07So there's a company that owns the Houston area of the grid. There's a company that owns kind of from Austin to Fort Worth, Dallas area. Those guys are regulated and they legally cannot own assets that generate electricity and they can't sell electricity to customers. So they're the carrier, but they don't get to participate in the buy sell side. Exactly. They just are a carrier. So they're like the railroads. They don't get to be the factory or the distribution center. That makes total sense. Juggling multiple devices and apps to run your business is a mess. Open Phone is here to make it simple by simplifying your business communications with one easy to use app.

9:46Open Phone has rethought every detail of what a modern business phone should be. And here's the magic. It works through a beautiful, elegant app on your phone, or you can just use it on your desktop, making it super easy to get a business phone number for your entire team. And you know how brilliant OpenPhone is? My teams use it every single day. My sales team loves it. My ops team, they use it all day long. And here's the features that we love. You can create a shared phone number like customer support with multiple employees fielding all the calls and all the texts to that one number. At my investment firm launch, we pride ourselves on replying to every single call or email instantly and open phone is the number one rated business phone on g2 for customer satisfaction so here's your call to action super easy open phone is already affordable starts at just 13 bucks a month but twist listeners get an extra 20 off any plan for the first six months at open phone.com twist and if you have existing numbers with other services no problem open phone is going to port them over easy peasy lemon squeezy no extra cost head over to open phone.com twist to start your free trial and get 20 % off.

10:50So what you're saying sounds like a logical, efficient system, yet I hear people complaining constantly about electricity in Texas. So what am I missing here? Why is there a disjoint between what seems like a, I don't want to say a perfect marketplace, but a functional marketplace? What's the issue here? Why is the system failing so much? And why do people complain about it so much? Yeah, so Texas, unfortunately, is one of the leaders in the nation on power outages, right? And this is a confluence of a few factors. One is that the renewable supply is the highest in Texas, as we discussed, right?

11:30And so when the sun isn't shining, and the wind isn't blowing, you have to have an alternative source of energy. And so So that's where we come in with batteries. But that is one area where I think the market has not moved quite fast enough, although it's moving fast with companies like us coming into the market to add batteries to sort of fill in those gaps over time. The other item is just that there's a lot of natural disasters and storms like the one we had in Houston a few days ago. So extreme weather has always existed in Texas. That's right. And so that is table stakes. That's right. That's right.

12:10And I think like, you know, the grid itself, like the middle part, the poles and wires have not really been upgraded nearly as fast as the growth in both population and what they call load growth. Basically, people getting EVs. So they weren't charging a car. Now they are. That's a huge strain on the system. This phenomenon is not just a Texas thing. texas gets a lot of uh has a lot of people and gets a lot of press over this um but this phenomenon happens happens elsewhere right so we're having it in california constantly the amount of times the peninsula uh where i live in the bay area or tahoe goes down is just a dozen times maybe a half dozen times a year and you know sometimes it's for four days five days i had to move into a hotel because we didn't have power for that many days yeah it was the longest ever five days recently yeah yeah and so so this problem is not just a texas centric problem although it is exacerbated by the conditions i was just mentioning um here in texas one other interesting point jason that might be interesting to to to talk about here is uh in here i'll share my screen right is if you look at uh energy prices here in texas um what you'll find and this is a chart from 2010 to 2020.

13:23Hopefully you're seeing that. Yeah. What you'll see is a pretty reliable trend that is the following. So if you're looking, if you're not watching on video, basically this is a stacked bar chart, 10 years from 2010 to 2020. And the top of the bars are roughly the same. They're at 10 cents per kilowatt hour. Units aren't really relevant for this discussion, but it's 10 cents for every kilowatt hour that you use. And that's remained consistent for over a decade. That's right. That's remained consistent for over a decade. The makeup of that cost, though, is changing quite dramatically. So what you see on this graph in the yellow bars here is the delivery costs.

14:02So this is the cost for the poles and wires, basically, to pay the rails, to use your analogy from earlier, to get that energy to you. Whereas, so those costs have increased. From about 25 % to 40%, it looks like. That's right. That's right. And the cost to produce the power, this is the prior comment about wind and solar just being, frankly, more affordable way to generate power. That cost is shrinking over time. That was about 70%, it looks like, and it's now down to maybe 50 % of the cost. That's right. Once you install the solar panels, I mean, this maybe sounds obvious. Once you install the solar panels, there's not much ongoing cost.

14:39If you have a coal plant or an after gas plant, you have to pay for the fuel to generate the electricity. um and so what we're here to do is reduce those yellow bars reduce the delivery costs by adding batteries to the grid that reduce the strain on the grid during peak times got it and so that is good for the consumer and you have a you know sort of tragedy of the commons you know the the delivery costs and that infrastructure is like a well that the town all gets their water from you know somebody you know um you have to basically protect it that's right that's right yeah for every person who puts in solar and a battery pack or just a battery pack the strain goes down therefore uh and that person's delivery cost goes down and that person i guess becomes potentially part of delivering power to their neighbors that's right the the way the analogy i i'd like to use here jason is let's imagine that you and i are both standing on opposite ends of a lake i have a cup of water you have an empty cup i pour my water into the lake you you use your empty cup we pick up water it's not like you didn't get my water right you you got water it's you got water but it's but it's like my water contributed to the level of the lake got it right and that's kind of the way to think about um how the batteries contribute.

16:04The other important point I think that's worth knowing, Jason, is when we add solar onto the grid, solar, you know, stating the obvious here, only produces during, you know, 8 a.m. and kind of 6, 7 p.m., right? And so, you have this phenomenon that happens called the duck curve. And folks can look this up. I don't have a visual quite handy. This is really prevalent in California and it's starting to become prevalent in Texas. The curve is shaped like a duck and the belly of the duck, the middle of the day is when you have a lot of solar and not a lot of demand. And then everyone comes home from work, turns on their oven, plugs in their EV, turns on their conditioning as the sun is setting.

16:43And so you have this sort of compounding effect of increasing demand during this short period of time and decreasing supply. This is obviously bad for prices. And this is really where batteries come in. So we are charging at the middle of the day when there's that excess solar right for relatively low cost because there's extra solar the solar operators would have just unplugged their pad their panels from the grid anyways yeah exactly exactly there's the duck so there's the duck yeah uh and you see at 6 p.m everybody gets home that's the peak that's the head of the duck and then the duck bill goes down and duck's looking down and it goes down throughout the night i guess you probably have your air conditioning on whatever and then during the day you know somewhere at a time around six seven eight a.m you leave the house hopefully you're not leaving your air conditioning down so all these giant homes in texas everything's big in texas get these big footprint homes people turn off their air conditioning during the day it goes way down and they're not using their washing machine they're not using their oven um they're just using the steady state stuff right and so yeah that's right And so what batteries do is at the bottom of the duck's belly, they're soaking up that excess energy that would have just not gone anywhere, right?

17:56And then at the beak of the duck, at the peak around 6 p.m., they're discharging to reduce the cost on the system. So the entire grid is sized for peak demand for that 6 p.m. time. On August 15th here in Texas when it's 115 degrees out, the entire system needs to be sized for that. But the rest of the year, it is, you know, definitionally not as strained. And so if you can reduce that peak, you now can have increased growth of both loads of people coming into the state, people getting EVs, etc, as well as increased renewable generation by virtue of having batteries on the grid. it's almost the perfect system uh because you you need to batteries let you you know basically shift time right you're shifting time exactly of when this stuff gets used and you want to shift it to the time when it's most expensive and most in demand and it just happens to be that i guess our migration patterns as humans is to leave our homes go to an office go to work go to school and then pee when the sun goes down it's actually kind of brilliant but batteries are in fact expensive and i'm curious if you know a place like texas can really take advantage of this because of specifically air conditioning right if it wasn't for air conditioning this would not be as an acute of an issue am i correct uh yeah air conditioning is a is a decent part of the load um evs are sort of adding to that though like imagine that as energy consumption at the end use goes from natural gas for your stove and gasoline or diesel for your car changes into electricity you're sort of displacing a lot of of fossil fuels with with electricity so even if energy usage in total doesn't necessarily go up its shift goes from fossil fuels more to electricity at the end.

19:55And so that's right. Does the grid charge dynamically? So the 6 to 9 p.m. window is more expensive than other times? Yes, it does. And this is in particular something that's really interesting here in Texas. And I want to show you another chart here. So this is what I'm going to share here is from ERCOT. Remember, this is the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. These are the guys that operate the New York Stock Exchange of Texas Energy. So this is just today. We're looking at this totally live. Today's actually a pretty good indication. And so what you'll see on this graph is the x-axis here is kind of the whole day, so midnight to midnight.

20:33And then the y-axis is price. And so this is the price that you pay for that 15-minute interval. The price changes every 15 minutes here in Texas for energy. And what you'll see today is like an interesting day. It's not super hot. But you know, you can see that that supply and demand dictate a increasing price here. And if you look at what the this is this dotted line right here is the day ahead market. So this is what people thought the prices were going to be for today, yesterday. So they submitted a day ahead price, and they got it's$87 from seven bucks this morning. I mean, so it goes, it went up 12x or so.

21:13That's right. In the same day. So if a person were to load their battery from the grid, just doing that, if you load your battery between 1am or 2am and 6am or 5am seems like the proper time to load your battery up. And then you deploy it during that period, you paid 8 % or something like that for your electricity compared to your neighbor. You save 90%. That's right. And prices, again, in a sort of free market here are reflective of supply and demand, right? So if we go back here, and honestly, anybody who's interested in this, I'd strongly encourage you. I'm a big nerd about this, so I have this open all the time, but I think it's pretty interesting.

21:56ERCOT is E-R-C-O-T, and the website is ERCOT.com. That's right. And so prices are driven by, you know, in a free market, it's perfectly liquid by supply and demand. And this chart that we're looking at here is both is supply and demand, you can see the blue line here that the turquoise line is demand. And the purple line is that they call committed capacity. This is basically, basically supply is kind of the way to think about it. these are people who've agreed to put energy into the system so this could be coal it could be nuclear it could be that's right ass exactly it can be it can be any any generation source essentially and if you remember on the last chart we had that price spike to like 85 or so right around uh our ending they call it 21 uh you can see the reason is that because demand and supply are getting pretty close here.

22:54And what we saw just two weeks ago, actually, was that demand and supply actually touched. They got basically to a point where there was no excess supply available. What happens when that happens when that overload condition happens? So ERCOT has a bunch of procedures and policies around this. But by and large, what happens is they actually go and ask the utilities, the people who are delivering the power, to shut off the power this is this is like similar to what you what you mentioned what happens in northern california with the wildfires you just say hey we're gonna we're gonna shut off the circuit and we're gonna do a rotating outage and so so they're gonna spread the pain by neighborhood that's right they're gonna say hey this zip code these thousand ohms are gonna get turned off for an hour then this group for an hour um they don't have the ability to press a button and increase supply dynamic.

23:46That's right. And one of the concerns with all of the renewable generation is like, you can't, you know, if it's 7pm, you can't make more sun or wind, which is sort of what it is. It's not a windy day. Germany's learning this. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And so this is exactly where batteries come in. You start doing a combination actually of two things. And this is pretty interesting. You both raise this purple line, which is the capacity, because you're pushing energy back into the market. You're basically giving more supply, but you're also reducing demand when you have the battery on the home. This is a really important point.

24:19There are multiple ways to put batteries on the grid. Our methodology is putting them at the edge of the grid on the home, co-located with where you're using the energy. Because if you put the battery upstream on the grid, let's say you buy a farm field and you kind of put it in the, you know, quote unquote, the middle of the grid, you're really only helping supply. You can only move the remove the top line here, the purple one, by putting it on the home, you can basically effectively turn off the home from the grid. And so you discharge that battery into the home to serve the home's load, to run your air conditioning, to charge your EV, et cetera, instead of that home pulling from the grid.

24:57And so you're able to basically make this gap here that we're seeing on the screen between supply and demand widen, and therefore have a more resilient grid that's really what we're doing is moving purple up and and uh at certain times moving um moving turquoise down but you're not doing solar so it's just batteries so i guess the question is why just batteries and then uh we'll get to i guess the business model here uh are you making batteries are you agnostic to batteries and then what does it cost to put these in the average, I'm guessing the average home in Texas is 3000 square feet. I think things are pretty big there, right?

25:37Something about that. Yeah, yeah. One thing that drives me crazy is when I want to buy something on a website, but there's too much friction when I go to check out, I want a smooth and easy payment experience. And of course, it's got to be safe and secure. And sometimes I like to have other ways to pay, like through my digital wallet, or even buy now pay later, which by the way, is super popular these days with a lot of people if you're a merchant you got to be able to offer alternative payment methods so called apms in the industry and you know who's the best at this that's right squarespace squarespace payments makes it easy for customers to make purchases which equates to more revenue for your business it's super easy to set up and will keep your mrr going up and to the right which is what we're all looking for so check out squarespace.com twist for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com slash twist to get 10 % off your first website or domain purchase once again squarespace.com slash twist maybe we'll just go over the unit economics here how much does it cost to put a battery into a home and how long do people want to power their home are they looking for 24 48 hours four hours what are you advising them to do what's the standard deal you do for the standard home because i know yeah constantly when we talk about things here on this podcast and in life people tell me it depends and i'm always like my lord i hate it depends i like numbers so i give you the average home and what do you suggest as the average install for the average utilization for the average time off grid i promise i won't tell you it depends, Jason.

27:19So let's maybe go over the business model and then we'll go real specific on numbers here. So the high level is it costs our customers$2 ,000 to put a battery on their home. This is far, far cheaper than if they were to buy the battery outright from any number of different sources and own the battery themselves. Let's get to the business model here, because this is like a really key piece. So our business model is we become the energy company for the customer. So again, in Texas, we can be what's called a rep, a retail electric provider. Basically, that means that we build a customer for their energy, and we buy the energy through ERCOT, like we just looked at.

28:01And we so we do that. But in addition, and we're the only ones that do this, we give a battery to the homeowner, we retain ownership of that battery, the$2 ,000 is just the cost of installation. It's not the capital cost of the battery. So they pay$2 ,000 and then they get the battery in the event of an outage. So power goes out, the battery feeds their home. But all other times when the grid is up, we're doing exactly what we just looked at. We're decreasing demand and increasing supply. And we're bidding that energy into the ERCOT marketplace. And so on average for the average 3 ,000 square foot home, We have a really simple product offering.

28:40We install the battery, we handle all of the permits, we handle all of the billing, and we handle the entire process. And so$2 ,000 gets you a battery, you start signing up for our electricity, and then you pay us monthly for your energy. that that price that you pay is interestingly enough not a um typical rate so basically everywhere in the u.s including texas people pay on a per usage basis we're doing uh basically a flat fee and that's enabled by the battery because we're able to kind of uh smooth out the demand and supply and smooth out the prices um such that we can offer a flat bill so people can budget for it the variability that's right uh and you what if so does that mean you have all you can eat pricing and then people are like oh yolo i'm gonna just run my air conditioning at 58 degrees um what we've found actually is that people don't really change their behavior all that much based on this i think like there's a um there's a parallel or a bit of a parallel here and kind of the cell phone, you know, marketplace where you used to pay on a per text message or per sort of minute basis.

29:51And what we found is people don't really change their behavior all that much. I will say we do have provisions for abuse. And so if somebody is actually running, you know, if they're having windows open or doing Bitcoin mining, et cetera. Busted. Yeah. So don't get any ideas, Bitcoin miners. OK. And so batteries, I know the Powerwall is like 12K now or something like that. So do you use Tesla's Powerwalls? do you make your own um how much does the battery cost you uh to put in there because it does seem like this is a finance play in some ways because you've got to take that cost of the battery and you've got to pick that up i guess release it over time and then there's interest and that's expensive and then how many batteries do you put into this 3 000 square foot home what's and how long do people get told they can stay up and running in the event of like i guess it was two christmases ago or something i remember during the pandemic or shortly after all my friends in texas were like freaking out because i mean it was like a very serious situation because it was 30 degrees and people lost power so there was no heat um and in some cases and then people were um i had a friend who had like a generator and everybody was at his house it's pretty interesting yeah yeah Yeah, yeah, that's, like I said, was saying earlier, this just like, literally, last week happened to some of our customers here in Austin and many more in Houston.

31:17So okay, so you, you, you're asking about, how long? How does it? How does it? How does the kind of unit unit economics work? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Walk through it. So, yeah. So, and you also asked about the battery hardware. So today we're deploying a mostly off-the-shelf unit that we purchased from a third party, and we put in our compute module. And that compute module allows us to talk to the battery, load our software, remotely command and control it, and get really, really accurate telemetry that we can then feed back into the grid operators to kind of give them a picture of what's going on.

31:52We are currently developing a custom unit that I'll show you here. And I'd love to just kind of give you a visual of what this looks like. Yeah. And this unit will be available early next year. And this is the base home battery. So this is a custom unit that we're developing. And what you see here is what looks like kind of like an air conditioning unit. So most batteries are wall mounted and they're pretty small. And that makes them very difficult to install. And it honestly doesn't make them look very good. You gotta find the studs and stuff like that. You gotta find the studs. And like, we're installing a lot of these.

32:26And so our installers have to know if it's a stud-based house or brick or stone. These things seem like, you know, not that big of a deal. When you're doing a lot of these and you're doing it very repeatably, they become a very big deal. These look like a small refrigerator, you know, like a dorm room refrigerator. It's about four feet high. How tall is that? Yeah, it's about four foot tall and about two, two and a half feet kind of square on the base. and that it is all stackable internally. And so the installation is very easy. Our goal is to put a lot of batteries on the grid. We can't spend a lot, a lot of hours on every home and make it very custom for every home and go find the studs to your point.

33:04And so one of the key different differentiators for our hardware product that we're coming out with early next year is this concept of making it very easy to install. Typically, batteries are not used for our business case, right? Typically, batteries are purchased by the home. homeowner and they're typically paired with solar and so like the install time isn't really that big of a deal we're you're right we're trying to build a business around uh putting batteries on homes and so install time is really really important to us um so that's that's the hardware and they seem like they're extendable you had two in the picture there there were different heights so i guess if somebody has a 5 000 or 10 000 square per home they could have four of these i think the reason for the thin walls was most people put these in their garage and aesthetically you know a two foot deep one is going to take up your garage space maybe you got a tight garage now you can't pull the car in so maybe these but again in texas people have pretty big garages i think so yeah these are these are intended to be installed outside jason oh they're outdoor oh okay that's right that's right and so this is like so they go right next to you 115 degree heat uh we have we have built it built it for that purpose so well we know we know our market well uh we personally live with 115 degree heat every day in the summer and so uh yeah we've we've designed it with that that use case in mind but basically these the way to think about this is these go next to the meter um and they are the home's interface to the grid so it goes basically the grid flows into the meter that you're likely familiar with goes into our system and then our system goes into the home um and again it's all stackable and easy to easy to easy to assemble and so long does the home stay up and running then so the home it depends so i said i wouldn't say it depends i said i wouldn't say it depends i will i will take that back average home three thousand square foot yeah of one of these units is about a day is about a day um so that's more than enough and if you know you're on a day that's right and it's extending well maybe you don't run your washing machine for that right day and maybe you don't you turn off your refrigerator in the garage and consolidate or you don't run the air conditioner at full speed.

35:09Yeah. And if you look at outages, Jason, like the long ones get the press. Of course. But what we've found, right, is we have a bunch of customers just north of the city here. And we've had a handful of customers that have only been with us for a handful of weeks and they have had multiple outages. And they're like 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes. We looked at a lot of outage data as we're building the company here. and what we found is that our system as just as i just showed you we protect folks from 97 percent of outage hours basically and so the vast majority of our outages you're covered the entire thing and what's really cool is that because it's a battery it can turn on just like that instantaneously if you have a generator power goes out you know you uh generator spools up everything reboots we had a we had a customer that was um was watching national championship football game actually if Yeah, you're on a Zoom call, you're recording a podcast and yeah, no problem.