Welcome to the ENT!
A new energy technology combines solar energy with energy storage, providing reliable energy and overcoming a major hurdle to renewable energy. Solar power is abundant, but only works when the sun shines. Our guest, KJ Lee from Q3 Power, explains how his company combines both solar power and energy storage to solve this dilemma.
Right from the beginning, KJ explains how a parabolic trough creates heat. Then, like the advertisements for Reese’s peanut butter cups, where peanut butter was mixed with chocolate, the other half of the technology comes together. The current product provides industrial grade electricity generation 24 hours a day, powered by the sun, even when the sun does not shine.
In this extended length episode, we cover the basics and answer common questions about service, installation, and also provide some technological detail as well. For large data centers and other high energy users, this new technology provides “behind the meter” energy creation. For utilities, it could help to levelize the load on the grid. And, in the future, they will release a retail home version as well.
As always, it is good to have an expert on your side.
Our guest:
KJ Lee
Q3 Power
615-801-0205
KJ@q3power.com
https://q3power.com
The Expert Network Team provides a free consultation.
Nathan Merrill
Legal Expert
Goodspeed, Merrill
(720) 473-7644
nmerrill@goodspeedmerrill.com
www.goodspeedmerrill.com
Taylor Smith
Attorney
Goodspeed, Merrill
(720) 473-7644
tsmith@goodspeedmerrill.com
www.goodspeedmerrill.com
Karl Frank
CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™
A&I Wealth Management
(303) 690.5070
karl@assetsandincome.com
[00:00.7]
Welcome to the Expert Network Team podcast.
[00:20.3]
Welcome to today's podcast. I'm Nathan Merrill and today with us we have Carl Frank of a wealth management and Taylor Smith, Goodspeed Merrell also. I'm also Goodspeed Merrell. And then we also have KJ Lee with us who is with a company called Q3 Power.
[00:43.2]
A couple weeks back or on a prior podcast we talked about tax equity, Carl and I, and about what that means, what that is, and, and kind of gave a brief teaser on some of the platforms, plugins we have for tax equity and Q3's innovative renewable energy solution is one of those.
[01:05.7]
So welcome KJ we're looking forward to you kind of telling us some of the deeper details to the extent you can get into it, of how you guys came to be and what you're doing. But I don't know if you want to take just a quick moment KJ and lead us in with intro of you and then we'll do dig into to Q3 power and what you guys have going on.
[01:31.3]
Yeah, thank you so much Nathan, really appreciate that. So KJ Lee with and I'm the chief revenue officer for Q3 Power which is a company focused on water, energy and elements. And so we have two technologies really at scale and market.
[01:52.0]
And that is, and they, they change the world. So one of those is energy. We'll focus a lot about that and how that affects tax equity, Nathan, like you mentioned. So KJ just to kick this off before we really wet the appetite for Carl and Taylor to dig in, since we will kind of focus I think principally on your energy solutions.
[02:16.2]
But I think it would be helpful for people to understand a little bit the history of how we get to energy. And you mentioned the water. So perhaps start with some of what you've done historically with the water, kind of the unique approach you take there and then and then merge in with that the technology you acquired in the, in the electricity generation space and kind of how that merger all occurred.
[02:43.7]
Absolutely great questions. So this, but jump with me into the Wayback machine and go 15 years in the past where our founder and CEO, Rod Kagi met a, an inventor of a technology, a thermoplastic sheetless thermoforming of thermal plastics.
[03:08.5]
So that's very, very, very large parts, large plastic parts and there's a huge variety of applications for that. And, and one of these products was a parabolic Trough. Now what a parabolic trough is, it's a, it's a curved kind of like a half pipe.
[03:27.2]
It's of course in a trough, type assembly. And it's coated with a reflective film. And this reflectivity is 92% mirrors that you see yourself in. Touch up your makeup in is 88 to give you some idea, of how reflective this film is.
[03:46.3]
And so what, what the inventor was doing was concentrating light, sunlight to make heat. And that heat was being used to perform a process called multi effect distillation. So distillation at its core is when you're boiling water on the stove and the water comes out in the form of steam, that's distillation.
[04:07.5]
And so multi effect distillation does. It's in an encapsulated column and that captures the water that's distilling off and recondenses it. And because water boils at a much lower temperature than other things like salt, gold, other materials that are found in contaminated water sources, that water that comes out in distilled form gets recondensed at the end and now is USP Pure Water.
[04:37.2]
So that was 15 years ago. Fast forward some time. For the last 10 years that's we've been deploying water systems into the field all over the world, to purify all kinds of water from gold mine tailings to ocean to hog manure to lithium brine, all kinds of things produced water from fracking, to name a few.
[05:00.6]
And so that, that data, of all that time told us that we had the ability to generate a humongous amount of heat consistently in the neighborhood of 1,000 degrees F. So lots of data, lots of commercial operations on the heat generation side and then the rest of the system.
[05:23.9]
So Nathan, I'm just going to keep rolling into how that applies to electricity and what that means, because the history really tells the story of how all this came together and how we have this energy production system. So meanwhile back on the ranch, so Bob, in his company and you know, is doing this process with water and making tremendous amounts of heat with a parabolic trough, one of, one of a kind.
[05:50.8]
Meanwhile, back on the ranch, another inventor who is multiple PhDs, world renowned for what he does in engineering is he's deploying a system that takes waste heat from industrial processes like manufacturing or data centers that produce a lot of heat.
[06:09.8]
And he's storing that heat to then dispatch out through, a conversion system which converts that heat into electricity. And it's a conversion system that's very, very common in the world. It's used all over the place. So he's doing this and at some point, so back about four or five years ago, about five years ago, these two technologies meet.
[06:39.1]
So Rod has one and he learns about the other one. The one that is storing heat and converting that heat into electricity. At at scale there's over 30 installations of that system in the world and the oldest of which has been running for 20 years and it still runs today.
[06:57.9]
So Rod learns about these and he says, well what, what would happen guys, if we put these two technologies together? And let me, let me interject there because most of the waste heat is running about what, 200 degrees Fahrenheit or thereabouts or what's the range of the heat that they're pulling off?
[07:16.9]
So waste heat, those Systems are running 160 to 180 F. Okay, yeah, that's little heat. That's like household heat, right? You can generate that in any, any household. And this, this is the moment that you're getting to, that I like to describe as the, for those Gen Xers out there is the.
[07:36.8]
Your chocolate fell in my peanut butter or no, your peanut butter fell in my chocolate. If, if you guys remember the old Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, like, like which one is the, the driver of it? It doesn't really matter because, because one came together with the other and, and beautiful things happen.
[07:55.0]
So I'll let you, I'll let that be the segue to you. Talk about the Reese's Peanut Butter cup moment for this technology. I love the analogy, Nathan. It's wonderful. So Reese's Peanut Butter cup chocolate and peanut butter came together, but in this case we're talking about heat from the sun at tremendous amounts over a thousand F consistently came together with the ability to store that heat and convert it into electricity on a 24 7, 365 basis.
[08:27.7]
So these two things came together about five years ago. And so we started saying, asking the question of how do we actually integrate these two technologies so that we can deploy this system anywhere in the world that the sun shines. And so we've done that.
[08:43.6]
And from that the Q3 Power Energy Solution was born. So the way the tech works, we concentrate light to make heat using that same parabolic trough that's been out there for a very long time. We transfer that heat into this proprietary thermal energy storage system.
[09:03.2]
Thermal energy we're just storing heat gets really hot. Kind of like the Florida beach, the sand when you're walking around after the sun goes down and it's still warm on your toes. That is the same concept as what we're doing with the heat storage.
[09:19.2]
And then we release that heat out through a conversion system that ultimately is a spinning electrical generation device, no different than coal, no different than nuclear. And we make power 24, 7, 365.
[09:35.4]
And the beautiful thing is this thermal energy storage system, assuming no thermal input, meaning the sun didn't rise and we're all dead.
[09:47.6]
Well, there could be cloud cover, but to be fair, like it would take pretty significant enduring cloud cover. New England worthy New England, or our lovely state of Washington. Right? So, so assuming no thermal input, that storage only cools at a rate of 1% per 24 hours.
[10:11.9]
So to put that in real terms, if you have a 800 degrees stored after 24 hours, you now have 892 degrees or excuse me, 792 degrees. So stored. So it cools at 1% per day. So that's kind of the short version of, of the electricity.
[10:30.7]
And this, this output electricity is 480 volt, 3 phase 60 Hertz, which is common industrial grade, utility grade electricity in the United States.
[10:45.3]
Wow. What does it look like? How does that, how does that, I mean is this like a big, great big half pipe tube that's like 100ft long and 50ft wide? What is this? Yeah, along with answering that question, kj, talk about the efficient. Because a lot of people are familiar with like solar fields, solar farms, they see them as they drive across the Midwest or Nebraska or stuff like that.
[11:08.5]
Talk about how this in, in connection with an answer to Carl's question, how it compares in terms of square footage per kilowatt hour generated relative to those other renewable energy sources that other folks are familiar with.
[11:26.2]
And guys, these are great questions. So, so for those of you watching on YouTube, I'll actually put a screen up here. But yes, it's a, it's a long half pipe. And so as you look at the this, this is the picture of the technology.
[11:44.7]
So on the left here we see, there you go, curvature very much. Looks like a half pipe. And it's actually a parabola, which in calculus is, is a mathematical function for finding things. So the parabola is basically.
[12:02.6]
Yeah, it's a half pipe and it goes down, it's about 160ft long. And the tips of the wings, which is the ends of that half pipe are 24ft in width. The height is 18ft tall. So this is the.
[12:19.1]
The layout of the parabolic trough is what we call it. It's made up of nine sections, each of which are 15ft wide, or 15ft long, rather 24ft wide and 18ft tall. Nine sections make this particular system that's shown on the screen.
[12:36.4]
And given the solar irradiance of Colorado, which is actually some of the best sun in the U.S. people don't always know that it's like Florida or some of these other places, but Colorado's got extremely good sun. Y' all should come check it out. So that is how we concentrate the light to make heat.
[12:56.8]
And that light concentration is the same concept as using a magnifying glass to fry an ant or start a fire when you're a kid, but it's a lot bigger. So this trough, that's the size of it. So that's around 4,000, 5,000 square feet in total.
[13:12.7]
And then on the back side, this right hand picture, for those of you on YouTube, this right hand picture is the storage. So what we're doing is we're transferring the fluid that's in the. The focal point. We're transferring that hot fluid into a series of thermal batteries, which cools the fluid and it recycles back up to the focal point to be heated again.
[13:36.5]
So on the back side, you've got a series of. There's six or seven of them. Four of them are shown here. There's a series of Connexes is what they look like on the outside. So a Conex is a, an 8 foot by 20 foot long shipping container that holds things.
[13:56.9]
In this case, we have things like, pumps and controls and electrical distribution and valves and thermal storage is what's held in these. So the holistic footprint for this system is a little less than 10,000 square feet.
[14:12.8]
This system puts out a net output of 6 megawatts per hour. So I'll break that down. Nathan, that was a great question about how does this compare to typical renewables? So if you take this and, I'm just going to use photovoltaic and Texas sun, which is also really good.
[14:31.9]
So if you're looking at Texas and the highest solar radiance you have there for 1 megawatt nameplate of photovoltaic solar panels, conventional solar panels, everyone's seen before. It takes 5 acres for 1 megawatt So you do 6 megawatts.
[14:51.6]
You need to 6x that 5 acres, right? So you're at a total of 30 acres for 6 megawatts of nameplate. Capacity nameplate. Just meaning that it's not baseload. It doesn't run 24. 7. That nameplate means that at its peak at noon, that's what the system is putting out.
[15:11.8]
So when the sun goes down, solar panels don't work anymore. Right. This system works round the clock. But to put this in perspective, putting that piece, the 247 piece aside for a second, just comparing the Nameplates of these two systems, we are one.
[15:27.6]
We're at 10,000 square feet for 6 megawatts. Photovoltaic solar panels takes 30 acres there, which is how many square feet? Let's convert acres into square feet, or vice versa, if you can. That's a lot. That's a big number. Yes, sir. So.
[15:43.5]
So here's the math. Four of the four of our system, the Q3 power system, fits in one acre. So following that math, we could fit four times 30 of these systems.
[16:01.2]
So our footprint is 11 20th of the footprint of, conventional photovoltaic solar panels. It's like a long, tall, big outdoor row of funhouse mirrors. That's what it looks like.
[16:17.1]
And if you walk up to it, it'll totally be like a fun house mirror. So, Nathan, I just ran the. The calculations. There are 43, 560 square feet in one acre. That's exactly how many there are.
[16:32.9]
So for 30 acres, you're 1 million, 300,006. So, 1.3 million square feet, short version. Wow. So you're doing 100 of these in the same space.
[16:48.9]
You can do 6 megawatts of solar. You're doing 600 megawatts, effectively, of this. Roughly speaking, correct, sir. Really interesting. How do you. How does it grab the sun if the funhouse mirror isn't facing the sun?
[17:06.2]
It looks like it's facing, you know, sideways. Great question. So this. This orientation you see here is, east to west. So it's a fixed orientation as the sun rises in the east. For those of you that are looking at the screen, the far end of this picture is the east side.
[17:25.0]
The sun comes up there, and it sets on the End. That's closest to us in this particular view. And this is December 30th orientation. Right. So this is almost near winter equinox, or whatever that is. Winter solstice. Right. So where the sun is, Carl, where the sun is lowest in the horizon, that is this orientation right here.
[17:45.6]
Correct. Moves like these great big funhouse mirrors move it. It does. And. But they only move once every other day or so. Oh. And the Reason they move, Carla, is that, you know, as you look at, like Nathan was saying, the sun is lower in the horizon in, you know, in winter equinox versus in the summer, it's higher in the horizon.
[18:11.4]
Right. That relationship of the sun to the earth in this hemisphere, that relationship is called the azimuth. So we follow the azimuth of the sun seasonally. So as that sun, as, the ark changes throughout the seasons, this system will adjust to follow it.
[18:31.1]
But every single day, the sun crosses the path of this parabolic. So it's in an east, west orientation to capture the full path of the sun. And it just adjusts as the sun rises, if you will, or falls in the horizon relative to season. Nate.
[18:48.7]
And put this thing out there in that parking lot. We got an empty parking lot at our boat. Well, yeah. So, Carl, you're getting, I think, a little bit ahead of, the curve on this, which is. Oh, man. No, I think it's great, the ability to deploy this.
[19:05.4]
Kj, I want you to talk about the versatility of this and where it can be placed and how it can be deployed, because I think a lot of people are going to have the thought Carl has, which is, gosh, I want this kind of power. Now, granted, it's expensive to build a 6 megawatt system, but just talk about how versatile it is and maintenance I'm interested in, you know, after implementation, technologies, you know, run into problems.
[19:36.0]
So how accessible, how affordable is it to, you know, how are they serviced and ongoing? Oh, whoops, Something is awry. And I'm interested in understanding they're there for a long time, so how often are they needing attention to, say, operating?
[19:55.1]
And this is awesome. I'm not a scientist, so you're blowing my mind right now. Well, we could. We could nerd out on physics and chemistry some other time, but, for now, we'll just hit the high level. So.
[20:10.8]
So I'll take these questions one at a time. Great questions, by the way, guys. So, from a. From a deployability perspective, the whole point of this system is to be able to deploy it anywhere the sun shines. So we can drop it literally, Carl, anywhere you want. The big parking lot. Cool.
[20:27.4]
That parabolic is designed to go on the top of a roof. It's light enough that it can be supported on most commercial buildings. Yeah. Let's put it on the roof. I like it. It's pretty cool, right? Right. The storage and some of those things would have to be on a very strong roof.
[20:46.1]
Like, think of a Parking structure or you'd have to put them on the ground because it's really heavy. Yeah. So it'd be difficult to spread the point load out enough. There's a fun mechanical engineering term, Taylor, point load. But, the parabolic's designed to go literally anywhere.
[21:02.6]
That, that design, it is, it's plastic. Now, plastic is a little bit of an oversimplification. It's actually a, it's a high impact polystyrene, that's embedded with glass.
[21:18.2]
So the relevance of that is it's actually a composite. So composites are extremely strong. For those of you that are plastic nerds like me, anyway. But yeah, it's plastic functionally. And so it makes it super light and you can put it anywhere.
[21:35.4]
That system that you saw, yes, it's very long, the trough is, but it's broken into multiple sections. That trough that you just saw, that's 160ft long is broken into nine individual sections. So as you need smaller power, you can put one section or two sections.
[21:52.2]
As you need bigger power, you can put 10, 12, 14 sections. And they don't have to be in a linear trough either. They can be, you know, side by side and the transfer pipe manifolded together, just like in your exhaust in your car. Manifolded, together.
[22:08.0]
So there's a, there's a ton of configuration to put this thing out there. And the same is true with every part of the system, the storage, the, you know, the actual conversion system. Every part of it is modular by design.
[22:24.3]
And that's very much intentional for exactly what, you know, Carl, you and Nathan were asking about, and that's the deployability to be anywhere. The big idea is, is to be able to put this thing into a C30, fly it somewhere in the world, drop it on the ground.
[22:42.0]
Within 72 hours, it is making power. That's the big idea. So to answer the question, Taylor, you had about, maintenance, that system is designed for incredible long lifetime.
[22:59.2]
So on average it's going to run for 20 years. Every component in there, this is industrial grade stuff, stainless steel, you know, heavy duty, very, very industrial, components in terms of its constructability and what it's made of. And so like a pump, for example, the pump that circulates that fluid, it's got a rated lifetime of 25 years.
[23:20.3]
Now things break to your point. So what do we do about that? Well, several things. The first is, is that we have a remote monitoring system that's watching a whole litany of sensors to watch for things like Vibration, you know, lack of circulation, lack of power, know things going wrong.
[23:41.3]
And that system's automated to. If we see a problem with the pump, let's say we kick over automatically to a bypass pump and the system comes with a bypass for every part of it. So that in field in real time, if something unexpectedly goes wrong, yes, the pumps are rated for 25 years, but if something goes wrong on year five, the client who's using this power is never out of power.
[24:07.3]
And the same is true with, you know, every part of the system. Major maintenance is every five to seven years. And I give it a range because it depends a little bit on the conditions. So like a sandy environment or an environment where you're close to the sea and you're getting a lot of abrasion on that film, that film needs to be replaced.
[24:27.5]
You know, in the five to seven year window. We do that at night because if you do it during the day, stuff gets hot and we don't want that on the guys doing the replacement. And the other major thing we do is that that storage material is actually, it's an organic material, it's non toxic and it's non flammable.
[24:48.2]
So and all we do is every five to seven years, it's based on number of cycles. So we pull that out, we pull the storage material out, we refurbish it and we stick it right back in. Because there's redundancy built into the storage, we can do this one chamber at a time.
[25:08.6]
That system you just saw has eight chambers on it. And we can maintain one chamber at a time independent of the other chambers. And so if you're running at night, you just pull heat from one of the other seven chambers that is not being maintained in the, as you're maintaining the first one and so on down the line.
[25:27.7]
So there's other. Doesn't bring it down. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Carl. Well, I was just saying maintenance doesn't bring it down. You can do your maintenance and still be getting your electricity. Bingo. And that's the point. The big vision behind this energy solution is to make the most power on the smallest footprint for the lowest cost at the fastest speed to market.
[25:53.1]
And that system that's deployed is the most reliable and the most scalable system in the market. And when we do those six things, Carl, what happens is, is we establish energy autonomy for our clients.
[26:08.4]
And that's what's really at the heart of this thing, is energy autonomy. You know, when an ice storm comes and the grid pole falls over you're not getting power to your house. Right. But if this thing is sitting right outside your, your business, your facility, and in the future, a residential model for a, for a home.
[26:27.2]
When it's, when this system is there, the, the grid and an ice storm can't take it down. And that's the whole point, is that power is the basis of our economy and the basis of a better life. Life's better having electric lights than it is lighting candles. Right.
[26:46.2]
So that's, that's the whole vision behind this technology. Really interesting. You, you teased something there. I'm gonna, I'll just lead into it so you can address it real quick. But the home units. So those are, so those are not released yet.
[27:06.1]
We're still doing R D and validation and testing on them. Those. But stay tuned. Nathan, your first, first appearance. I'm top of the list. Just for everybody to know, I'm top of the list here. On top of the list. So you are top of the list.
[27:22.2]
So the vision is for the residential unit is imagine for a moment something about the size of a DirecTV satellite dish. Just like what sits on top of your house now for your satellite or your Internet maybe something about that size that concentrates the light, that's your parabolic, concentrates the light to a single focal point.
[27:43.8]
And on the ground you have something about the size of a Generac backup generator. So figure four foot by four foot by four foot tall, roughly. And that's where the storage material and the conversion system sets. And now that is a completely self sustained 247 renewable technology providing power to every single homeowner in the U.S.
[28:08.6]
that's the big vision. And, and that vision even goes one step further. And that is to take that system and drop it in places, remote places that don't have a grid, remote places that don't have the type of infrastructure that we do. Imagine for a second that box lands on the ground and within 15 minutes power is being brought to a, school, is being brought to a factory, is being brought to a hospital.
[28:35.2]
In places all over the world, places that don't currently have these types of things. Yeah, I like to do the. What if we'd had this during Hurricane Helene up in, you know, the, the mountains of North Carolina, we, we could have brought power to them real quick.
[28:53.5]
But you know, K.J. i'm gonna just throw out this devil's advocate here. You know, something like this, it must be toxic, right? I mean you're dealing with chemicals and I'm Sure. Rare earth minerals that are dangerous to the environment and everybody's health. So how do you protect against that?
[29:11.7]
No, that's a, that's a great question. And so the formulas are, you know, are proprietary, of course, it's part of our IP stack. But this material is not like lithium ion battery that can catch fire and burn at 4400 degrees F.
[29:29.1]
It, you know, to the point that firefighters can't put it out. This material, we're storing heat. And so think of when it's in its solid state, it's like hair gel is kind of what it looks like, or jello, that would be clear.
[29:45.4]
But this material is non toxic and it's organic in nature. So you can actually eat this stuff. I don't recommend it, but you can, you can eat this stuff. And so it makes the, you know, makes installation and all the like.
[30:02.7]
When we look at how do we steward the Earth and how do we mine its resources? The resources in this case, reminding of the sun. We didn't want something that was toxic or dangerous to the environment. That kind of defeats the purpose. Right. So we spent a long time developing those things that are non toxic, non flammable and organic and recyclable.
[30:28.2]
What about hail storms? I mean, you mentioned kind of abrasion from sand and stuff like that. In Colorado, you're obviously going to get hail from time to time. Yes sir. So hail would affect the film or it could. And so what we do to deal with that is part of our automated system.
[30:45.4]
We watch the National Weather Service. You know, usually you've got a little bit of notice that things are going to come. The system's robust enough to handle pretty large hail. The only concern in that scenario would be the film. But what we do is we actually close up like a clamshell.
[31:02.5]
We close up the parabolic to, so the front side, the film is not affected. Doing this also prevents things like snowfall that will fall right off the back, you know, and the wind passes through the center. So in like a tornado scenario, that system is actually category 5 hurricane rate.
[31:23.6]
So that's, that's how we look at, you know, how to protect it from things like hail, which could be, you know, Nathan, to your point, could be something of concern.
[31:36.5]
But the justification to that is what happened to the solar fields in Texas when they had an unexpected hailstorm, right? Those things were shattered. They quit making power. All that, all that, those dollars and all that equipment went to waste because of hail.
[31:53.6]
Well, we had to think about these Things, you know, how do we prevent hail from affecting something like this? Okay, so another devil's advocate here because you brought up Texas. What happens in the cold weather, because you're in divide, it gets below freezing. Like it's not hot. It, you're right, it's not hot.
[32:12.5]
And so, but the ambient temperature has nothing to do with whether the sun is up or not. And so as long as the sun is up, Even if it's 4 degrees outside, we can still concentrate that light and make the heat.
[32:28.8]
And then in terms of storing the heat, that thing is so well insulated and the material has such strong thermal retention properties, which just means its ability to store heat that it's still, even in, even in a climate like Colorado where it does get below zero often, it still only degrades at a rate of 1% per day.
[32:49.7]
And even on a cold day, the sun is still there and we can still make a tremendous amount of heat from it. I imagine that, you know, maybe the cold weather degrades some of the battery storage ability. Right? I mean, you're out there.
[33:05.0]
This, if this thing's gathering heat inside the storage, it's just going to be melting the snow on the outside of it. But, have you measured that? Is that anything that's tangible or anything that's, you got to be aware of if you're in these colder climates? Now that's a good question, Carl.
[33:21.5]
So I'll go a little, I'll go a little deeper on that specifically. So what we use for insulation, so we insulate these tanks, the, the storage material, and that insulation, you can actually take a blowtorch to one side and put your hand on the other side of an 8th inch thick piece, of insulation and it will not burn your hand.
[33:45.2]
So that's the level of insulation that we're using. And that's part of the secret sauce of how we're actually, you know, insulating and holding that heat so well. So it's kind of funny though because we have the, the effect, Carl, where the, the snow will just kind of pile up on top of the insulation.
[34:01.2]
Interesting for the storage material, but these things are still holding the heat inside so it doesn't melt the snow. It's not like I can use it for two purposes. They're really interesting. And, and right now I'm still trying to wrap my head around how much electricity this is generating.
[34:17.5]
So we're in a 30,000 square foot office building here. I have no idea how much we use, but we're office building we're probably not using very much. I imagine the pictures you showed of the parabolic trough, the thing I call the funhouse mirrors, is for a big old factory or.
[34:34.7]
What kind of electricity are we generating here? I don't even know what those numbers mean. That's a good question. So I'll break it down to household. Kind of some average household, electricity consumption across the US So the average house in Texas in July uses around 1500 kilowatt hours. In a month.
[34:57.9]
In a month. So that system, the one that I showed you, makes six megawatts per hour. There's a thousand kilowatt hours in one megawatt. So in one hour of production, we're making 6,000 kilowatt hours.
[35:15.2]
That's enough for four homes for an entire month. That's one hour of production. Now multiply that by 24. Because we make power 24, 7, 365. So four times 24, four homes for a month, 24 hours a day.
[35:34.8]
So four times 24 is. 96. 96 households for a month is how much power we make in one day. Got it in that one that we've got stood up. And divide. Correct.
[35:51.6]
Now, if you divide, this is. I love math. This is so much fun. If you divide that 1500, by 30. Right? So a day, how much, you know, is a house using in a day? That's 50 kilowatts on average. 6,000 is how many kilowatts we make in one hour.
[36:11.6]
Or actually 96,000 kilowatt hours per day divided by 50, we can power 19, 20 homes per day with what that system makes in less than 10,000 square feet.
[36:30.7]
Seems pretty good to me. How many of these, already. Can I interject really quick? Can I interject some breaking news here? Amazon, Google Meta, Microsoft xai, Oracle, and Open Air set to sign an agreement with the Trump administration to generate their own electricity supply for AI data centers, per Fox News.
[36:57.0]
What does that mean to you, kj? It. It explains a lot, Nathan. So, and yes, Taylor, this is already commercially available. It's already making electricity. This is number 30, something of the system. The only difference is major heat.
[37:15.5]
So to answer your question, Nathan, you know, all of a sudden, go, go back in time about to April of last year, roughly, all these major data centers, the ones you just named, they're all saying the same, a version of the same thing, which is we're always going to buy power from the grid.
[37:33.9]
We're always going to, you know, use natural gas all These things, we're always going to use the grid. And at that time the demand, the projected demand for the data center industry was around 35 gigawatts. There was a thousand megawatts in one gigawatt.
[37:50.8]
So it'd be about 240 of those what we just saw on the screen, to make one gigawatt. So then fast forward to October and Trump's been elected at this point and some things are changing. These talks are happening and the data centers start calling and they're saying, well hey, so, so we're learning that the utilities are a decade away from being able to provide US power.
[38:18.3]
Natural gas is six years away. The fastest moving SMR nuclear technology is ten years away. Kj, how many of these things can you build and when can you start? So it's so interesting that the, that Nathan, that you just shared that Fox News report and here.
[38:38.0]
And we have a solution for them and it explains why the influx of demand all of a sudden happened within six months. We were going from the data center is saying we're only going to ever buy utility power to hey, so how many of these things can you do and how fast can you do it and what's the cost?
[38:54.5]
And let's go it completely paradigm shift. This is amazing. It explains so much. Pretty exciting times. Very exciting to put that into perspective as well.
[39:12.3]
And kj, you probably have better data on this, but we were in a meeting on Monday where someone was referencing a report they saw that basically said the projected data center power draw from things that are projected to be put in service over the next several years will basically require as much power as presently exists in the US power grid system.
[39:35.7]
So we basically have to double the amount of power the current US grid, the entire US grid produces in order to meet data center demand. Is that your understanding or something similar? Something similar. Nathan, I think that duplication of the grid is a little conservative. Oh, okay.
[39:56.6]
Yeah, I think it's actually higher than that. But these are really big esoteric things. The short version is, is that doubling the current US grid is not far fetched at all. It's very realistic and it's happening in real time.
[40:20.4]
So if, if you guys are met with stunned silence, you're, you're replicating what I mean. Mine was a little stunned silence when I first met with Q3 and a little giggles because it was like it was. And kj, you can attest to this. I think you were there.
[40:37.4]
We went over to your, your shop where you do all your kind of scale mod. And, and I was just thrown back to when I was a kid, and I'm like, you're burning ants. Like that's, that's the technology here. You're creating superheat. And. But you showed me basically a, a, one of those disc mirrors where you could actually burn a hole in granite.
[40:57.7]
Yeah, yeah. And. And that hole, Nathan, that was burned in granite that you could stick your finger in, that happened in about 15 minutes. It didn't take very long. We, we took that same dish, the one that you saw that day, where we set wood on fire instantly.
[41:17.6]
And on the coldest day of the year in 24, we had some guys out, and it was four degrees outside. And we did the exact same thing that you saw that day, Nathan, and it instantly caught wood, on fire. For, for perspective, the flashpoint of wood, meaning the point at which wood catches fire, is 532 degrees F.
[41:39.0]
And we did it within a second on a, on a day in January that it was 4 degrees outside. So just to illustrate the earlier point, this is really exciting stuff. Yeah. Another thing to bring into perspective here, because again, sometimes there's that inertia of thought here.
[41:59.0]
Well, photovoltaic has got to be better technology. Technology. This seems pretty primitive to say we're capturing heat when there's this really cool photovoltaic stuff. Can you explain the difference between how photovoltaic works versus heat capture and the efficiency, the comparative efficiency, and That's a great question.
[42:17.7]
So photovoltaic functionally works on the conversion of light directly to electricity, hence the name photovoltaic. It's through a process. It's the photons, right? Correct, it's photons.
[42:33.0]
Well, photons are part of the visible light spectrum. That's why when you wave your hand over a photovoltaic system, it quits making power almost instantly because the visible light spectrum has been broken. But with what we're doing, heat, and that's a chemical process.
[42:51.0]
It's, it's pretty basic. It's well proven technology, in terms of photovoltaic, but like you said, photons. So then there's the invisible light spectrum, things like UV and infrared. So if you've ever, in this process, the reflection of light to concentrating that to make heat takes advantage of the full spectrum of light, not just the visible light, the photons.
[43:17.4]
So what happens is, is if you've ever been to the, to a beach on an overcast day and gone back to Your hotel room and had a sunburn. That is UV light. That's the, in, in the rest of the light spectrum, it's not visible, right.
[43:34.5]
It's dark and overcast. How do you still get a sunburn? Well, that's, that's invisible to the human eye. Invisible light. So the thermal process that we do, concentrating that light to make heat, takes advantage of the flow full light spectrum.
[43:49.8]
And that's part of the efficiency equation. So what you mean by that is, if you're only focused on the visible light, which photovoltaic is, how much of the broad spectrum are you missing out on? Or alternatively, how much of the broad spectrum of energy are you actually capturing in photovoltaic versus full spectrum heat?
[44:12.3]
That's a great question. So only about 30% of light is visible. So 70% is left on the table. In terms of photovoltaic versus thermal. If, if we have fields, acres of photovoltaics out there right now, why, why wouldn't they go ahead and just switch part of their fields or add an extra acre and you know, six tuple their, production with this new technology?
[44:45.5]
Oh man, that's such a great question, Carl. We're just getting started, Carl. That's a great question. I love these questions, by the way. Guys, this is great. So Carl, there's, there's commercial and technical reasons for that, commercial meaning economic reasons.
[45:04.7]
So I'll, I'll do my best to touch on both quickly so we can keep going. From a, from a technical perspective, the, it depends on what that photovoltaic system is doing, what it's used for, those types of things. Like if you want to power, you know, one of our good clients is, has a series of branches.
[45:24.8]
Well, and all they need is to power, a water well. And that pump only draws 15 kilowatts, you know, and it just needs to fill up the well or the, the tank that the cows drink out of. It only needs to kick on a few times a day.
[45:41.1]
Well, that is one application. It's a really good application for photovoltaic. And to be clear, guys, we are at, Q3. We are proponents of all forms of energy. We need all types of energy. We need nuclear, we need coal, we need oil and gas. We need photovoltaic, we need wind, we need all of, we need geothermal and hydro.
[46:01.4]
We need the solution that we bring to the table. So we're components of all forms of energy. But back to the question. So in the big field scenario, you know, how Much power is that putting on the grid? And what is that? Right? What's that doing?
[46:18.9]
So photovoltaic makes power in D.C. and that, so that's direct current. And D.C. has to be inverted to AC. AC is alternating current. And that's what runs all of our houses and all the things. So the infrastructure may not be present for these large fields.
[46:36.5]
It could be added, but it may not be present to take large, you know, large, large production like ours does. Ours puts out 480 volt alternating current, three phase, you know, bit. This is big power.
[46:52.4]
This is industrial plant power. This is concrete plant power. This is. We're closer to nuclear than we are to photovoltaic. So those two things are very dissimilar from a technical perspective. Then from the commercial side, it's like, you know, what, what incentives went into that photovoltaic scenario?
[47:12.0]
What are the incentives behind? You know, maybe there's a reason they want to decommission the system. And then there's, in the utility space, there's. There's a thing called an interconnect. And what that is is the ability to feed that electricity into the larger grid.
[47:28.6]
So if that photovoltaic field is limited in size on it, how much electricity it can feed, they may not be able to, from a technical or from a commercial standpoint, based on the agreement they have with the utility, to feed any more power than what they already are.
[47:47.0]
Now sometimes they can. And this is a, wonderful developing business model which is, you know, we have something called a, we just call it the load follow system. What that means is, is exactly what you're alluding to, Carl, is if you put our system next to a photovoltaic field as the, as the sun is setting in the afternoon, as an example, the photovoltaic production decreases throughout the day, and it increases as the sun's rising in the morning too.
[48:17.6]
So it's kind of this bell curve from sunrise to sunset. Our system does have the capability of, storing that energy and dispatching it at increments. So what that functionally means is, is that we could actually levelize the production of energy all the way through, the day.
[48:39.4]
So when photovoltaics producing at the peak, they can produce at the peak. And as that starts to decline through today, we could pick up the difference and provide a consistent baseline energy production throughout the day. But the biggest thing, the biggest answer to that question is mindset paradigm.
[48:59.5]
Hey, we've done this photovoltaic thing and, well, that can't work. Or this is whatever. Right, right, right. Gotta change there. Well, the other thing we hear is like, redundancy. Everybody wants to hedge against something not working and whether that's solar or natural gas generators or diesel generators or whatever other.
[49:20.8]
Insert grid connection, whatever. Redundancy seems to be everybody's concern. And I, I don't want to get ahead on our skis here, but I know you guys are working on internally redundant stuff systems where, what if the sun doesn't come up for a full week? You'll still have the ability to generate heat.
[49:37.5]
But I don't want to get, You don't need to get into that. I'll just tease that out there that this, this system will potentially have internal redundancy. Well, and you're. It's not a battery, your storage system, what do you call it? Doesn't that provide redundancy in and of itself?
[49:54.9]
It does. And so currently, and there's, there's other solutions that are always being developed by our R and D team, so. But currently that battery, the way we size that battery when we're looking at a, at an application is based on what's the likelihood that we won't have ideal sun conditions.
[50:15.2]
So we're looking at cloud cover, we're looking at total solar radiance. And we run this on a 20, 30, year scenario. So we're looking at a long horizon, and we're doing exactly that. So for example, the system that we have right there, the one I showed earlier, it's got eight storage chambers, and the sun cannot shine for five days, which in Colorado would be a huge anomaly.
[50:41.5]
It's crazy. We get over 300 days of sun every year, a full sun, no clouds every year. And the system does generate a little bit of heat during cloud cover. So even in a cloudy scenario, we're still generating some, just not as much as we would like.
[50:58.3]
And so that balance is, that's exactly how we store the, the heat. We don't call it a battery. We call it a test for short thermal energy storage. But not everyone knows what that is. So for simplicity, heat battery is a common thing we use too. Thermal energy storage. Really Interesting. Yes.
[51:18.4]
Seems like you just sell those. We could. The key is though, is how do you feed it heat, Carl? Because it's not like you can just plug in the electricity that are coming off the photovoltaics or off of the wind farms. Right? You have to plug in heat. Correct.
[51:35.5]
So now we're touching on the physics of all this energy cannot be created nor destroyed, but it can be converted from one form to another. So functionally, we could convert electricity from photovoltaic into heat, just like your electric stove does.
[51:51.8]
When you turn that electric knob, it runs through a resistive coil and that's where it's run a great big toaster out there. Yeah. Bingo. But every time you change energy form, that's where you get the loss of energy. Bingo. And that's.
[52:08.2]
And that's why that doesn't. It doesn't make sense, Carl. By the time you go through the whole process of how many heating elements it would take and the amount of energy you could extract from the thermal storage, because now you got to convert it again. It's just not a very economic case.
[52:23.6]
And that's why we do it the way we do where we're generating the heat directly, tremendous amounts of heat, and then feeding that right through a conversion system that's designed to accept heat as the input. And, and I, I, think it's helpful because I've dealt with this problem out of my ranch.
[52:43.1]
I've talked before about how I've tried to. I have an off the grid ranch and we are presently using photovoltaic and a wind system. But you had mentioned earlier how photovoltaic is on DC and my wind is on AC and getting. That's why when you see those, like big wind farms, you rarely see solar attached to them because those two don't interconnect.
[53:03.7]
It's not like you can just run them into the same system. You have to convert the ac, but to DC to put it in a battery and then back to AC to actually use it. So there's a lot of conversion like incongruity there when you're trying to mix systems.
[53:21.8]
Yes. And that is. Yeah, now you're touching on electrical theory, but you're right. And even, even if you have two generators, Right. That are putting out AC on at the same time, there's a piece of equipment you need to, to actually balance the frequency.
[53:38.8]
So it's a sine wave is what it is. And that frequency is the distance between the up, and down on the sign. And balancing even with two alternating current systems is. It takes specialized equipment to do that. So you're 100% right, Nathan.
[53:54.8]
Is that the charge controller or what, what do they call that piece of equipment? Well, so we, we use a. So it's a. You can use a rectifier. Oh, rectifier. That's. I'VE heard all these things thrown out there, but it's that the rectifier is what we plugged into our system.
[54:12.1]
Bingo. Rectifier for especially a system like yours. Yeah. And it makes, it matches all the stuff that makes it happy. But doing that at scale like back to the photovoltaic field thing is incredibly expensive. Very long lead time, very specialized equipment.
[54:29.1]
You can't go down to Home Depot and buy one of these things.
[54:36.6]
So KJ on the back end of Nate, reading the news about the data centers in my community. So I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We have a kind of on the outskirts of Tulsa area called Sand Springs where there's still a bunch of land and they're, you know, big tech is coming in and putting in a data center.
[54:55.8]
And so I'm reading all these, you know, Facebook Live posts and all this stuff about people are scared, they don't understand, they're worried about, you know, we already can't afford, the economy's bad. What about my utility bills? How do you see your group coming in?
[55:14.3]
You know, as a co service provider supporter, assuming this new vertical we're hurtling towards very quickly with these data centers, how can you come in and speak to your ability to solve that problem and help regular people understand they don't have to be afraid, you know, it's already here.
[55:37.8]
And how you guys are helping solve the problem versus being big bad guys.
[55:47.6]
That's a great question. Thank you. So there's a couple of paths to it. And the first and most direct path is bring your own power. So these data centers, they can't get it off the grid anymore. Not like they used to and they still can.
[56:03.2]
But like I mentioned earlier, it takes a decade for the generation capacity for the infrastructure, meaning the big transmission lines that actually carry the electricity from the generation to the point of use. So in your example, a data center.
[56:18.4]
So what we're proposing to the market and is being received extremely well is look, we put out the power that you guys need. They all need 480 volt 3 phase, you know, big power. So we just tie that directly into the data center.
[56:35.3]
Rather than having to transport it for miles like the grid does, we tie it directly into the data center. And now there's no more tax on the grid because we run 24, 7 just like a data center needs. So we can drop our system right next to the data center and provide their power needs.
[56:52.0]
Well the, the, the industry term is behind the meter. So that just means that Just like if you put a diesel generator on your property and fed in to the building that's using it. Same Exact idea. So that's the first one in the most direct.
[57:08.7]
The second thing we're doing, and this is we're strategically rolling this out with the right partners across the utility space, is we can actually levelize load in terms of demand versus supply on the grid itself.
[57:25.0]
And so those are the two kind of paths that we're taking for big power like the data center. That's. If we keep them off the grid to begin with, then it takes away the problem to a large degree. But then for those data centers that are already connected to the grid and affecting small communities, by levelizing the supply versus demand that's happening on the grid, that creates a more baseline power scenario.
[57:52.1]
And so we're. We're pursuing that path as well. Not to mention the residential model. Stay tuned for more. Well, you've made me feel good about it. I'll spread the news. Spread the news.
[58:09.1]
I can't wait to launch the residential model. Maybe we come back in a year and say, hey, so here's what we have. That'd be a lot of fun. Yeah, we'll let Nate experiment on his ranch, and when it works, Taylor and I'll jump in shortly thereafter.
[58:27.1]
He's. Nate may not know yet, but he's actually exactly what you said. He's our test subject. So once we get it tested in the lab, we're gonna say, here you go. Put sliding ranch. Hopefully nothing blows in. I don't think it can break.
[58:42.6]
Nobody would notice. Well, that's true, too. But, like. Like we've talked about, there's nothing combustible in this. There's nothing toxic. There's, you know, very few moving parts outside of the generator and the pump. Like you. I've heard Rod talk about this.
[58:58.7]
Rod Kaggy, who's the. The kind of. The founder you mentioned earlier. KJ you guys took the KISS principle here and put it to the. The extreme. You're like, how. How much can we simplify the system? So when you showed that picture earlier, and people have seen maybe a natural gas power plant or something like that, with all the pipes and valves and it's like a labyrinth of. Of a system.
[59:19.9]
Here's like, in pipe, out pipe. There may be some other stuff going on in those conexes, but it's not acres of pipes and burnout valves and this and that and the other. It is a very simplified system, very simple.
[59:36.8]
Keep it simple. Stupid kiss. We wanted Very few Moving parts, Nathan. We wanted modular, deployment. We wanted the ability to put this thing anywhere. We wanted very, very redundant systems with multiple bypasses, multiple fail safes, multiple, you know, the ability to generate power and provide energy autonomy.
[60:00.8]
The core of what we do. And the system design reflects that. Very well said. Thank you. I'm excited out with you, you know, a while. Like I said before we started, like I, I've gone through this grilling with you, alongside you, to you like 50 times so.
[60:20.2]
Because as I've mentioned on the previous podcast, we due diligence Q3 to, to plug into our tax equity strategy and we couldn't be happier with the partnership we've we put together with Q3. I'm excited to learn more. And Nate I think you definitely have to convince the other building owners we got to do something here, even if it's small scale, just to test it out.
[60:46.2]
We'll see if we can raise the tax equity for it. We'll put it anywhere, right? Why not? Yeah. And look at the farmland in Oklahoma. We got some open spaces. I got some ideas. You got a lot of land.
[61:02.5]
You got a lot of land. Well, very good. Well, in hockey, in hockey we have a saying, so you stay out of the crease. I think that, you know, I want to stay out of the the hot spot on this thing that's generating what do you call this 480 volt 3 phase.
[61:18.5]
6,000 something big. Megawatts. That sounds like. I don't want to get my finger anywhere near wherever that thing is focusing its solar energy. I don't want to be like Nate's aunt that he used to burn as a, as a, as a young man growing up.
[61:36.7]
Am I right about that? I mean other than that it seems like just a really smart. Right. Just a really kind of a brain dead idea. Why maybe put a fence around it. Keep the little kids from playing, you know, playing, playing ball. And you're, you're going to be all right. Bingo.
[61:52.1]
And Carl, that's the key. So that focal point, the only place the heat is, is on the focal point. So that system, you can walk up to it and touch the reflective surface. Totally. You can totally touch it. If you put your hand in between the focus light and the focal point, you won't have a hand anywhere.
[62:12.1]
So the key is don't, don't climb up on the system and get in the way of that. But, but even then we actually have to. Because this system generates so much heat, we actually have A mechanism to break the focus so that that heat isn't being generated.
[62:29.9]
We actually have to dial the heat back because the abundance of light and therefore heat from the sun is so high, we have to keep control of the heat and dial it down constantly. Really interesting, really efficient, really efficient generation. Well, great.
[62:48.6]
Well, we'll put, we'll put more information in the podcast liner notes. What else should we know, as we wrap up the podcast here for our listeners today? Help is on the way. Help is on the way. Help is on the way.
[63:05.6]
We do people want to get. I would say yeah, if people want to get involved in this technology right now, outside of very large scale players, KJ Our tax equity practice is the only way to access any sort of, benefits from kind of being part of this, this movement.
[63:26.6]
That's correct. On a small scale. That's correct. Yeah. So, so the, the thing people should know is, you know, if you would like to be involved, call Nathan Merrill, at Goodspeed Merrill and he will get you the direct line to taking full advantage of this amazing technology.
[63:48.5]
Cool stuff. KJ thank you for your time today. Nate, thanks for making the introduction and Taylor, thanks for your brilliant questions and it's just great to see everybody today. Create a beautiful day. Thank you. Thank you guys. Thank you for joining us today.
[64:03.6]
I hope you enjoyed the discussion and the information we shared. We hope you enjoy the information contained in today's podcast and find it useful. We hope you'll join us again next time as we explore new areas of interest to our listeners or current issues we believe are important to discuss.
[64:20.0]
If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe so you are notified when future episodes are released. And also share it with a friend that you think would benefit. If you'd like to meet with a member of the Expert Network team or have a request for a special topic you'd like to have us discuss on the podcast, submit Those requests to infoxpertnetworkteam.com that's infoxpertnetworkteam.com thank you for joining us and have a great day.
[64:49.8]
Thank you for listening to this podcast. We want to remind you that listening to this podcast does not establish a client professional relationship with any of the professional firms represented, including guests, nor does it constitute legal investment, accounting or other advice of a fiduciary nature.
[65:06.5]
The views expressed are those of the professionals only. Investment advisor services may be provided through ANI Wealth Management securities may be provided through Jennios Wealth Management SA.
[67:02.6]
Thank you for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed the discussion and the information we shared. We hope you enjoy the information contained in today's podcast and find it useful. We hope you will join us again next time as we explore new areas of interest to our listeners or current issues we believe are important to discuss.
[67:20.3]
If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe so you are notified when future episodes episodes are released and also share it with a friend that you think would benefit. If you'd like to meet with a member of the Expert Network team or have a request for a special topic you'd like to have us discuss on the podcast, submit those requests to infoxpertnetworkteam.com that's info expert networkteam.com thank you for joining us and have a great day.
[67:50.0]
Thank you for listening to this podcast. We want to remind you that listening to this podcast does not establish a client professional relationship with any of the professional firms represented, including guests, nor does it constitute legal, investment, accounting or other advice of a fiduciary nature.
[68:06.8]
The views expressed are those of the professionals only. Investment Advisor services may be provided through ANI Wealth Management securities may be provided through Jenny S. Wealth Management.