177 - Empowering Clean Energy Futures with Scott Case, Founder of Zetawatts

In this electrifying episode of "The Insiders' Guide to Energy," we're joined by Scott Case, the visionary founder of Zetawatts, a pioneering company driving transformative change in the clean energy sector. Scott, who brings an entrepreneurial spirit from his days at Priceline.com to tackling global public health challenges, now focuses his formidable expertise on addressing one of today's most pressing issues: climate change and the urgent need to expand clean energy supplies rapidly.

Zetawatts stands at the forefront of revolutionizing how electricity is procured and consumed, aiming to triple the United States' energy supply through carbon-free solutions. Scott discusses the major hurdles in achieving these ambitious goals, emphasizing the need for innovative approaches to overcome systemic bottlenecks that hinder progress in clean energy deployment.

The conversation dives deep into the intersection of technology and energy. Scott outlines how Zetawatts leverages software to streamline the complex market dynamics between energy project developers and corporate energy consumers. This innovative approach facilitates long-term agreements essential for financing new clean energy projects, thereby accelerating the transition to sustainable energy sources.

Listeners will gain insights into the evolving landscape of environmental regulations, the pivotal role of corporate responsibility in achieving net-zero emissions, and the potential of software solutions to reduce Scope 2 emissions dramatically. Scott also sheds light on the challenges and opportunities presented by the current energy market, offering a glimpse into the future of energy procurement.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in the nexus of technology, entrepreneurship, and sustainable energy. Whether you're a professional in the energy sector, a technology enthusiast, or a concerned citizen, you'll find invaluable perspectives on driving meaningful change in the energy landscape. Tune in to discover how Zetawatts is powering up a cleaner, greener future.

Chapters

• 0:26 What are the biggest challenges towards doubling or tripling clean electricity supply to the US?
• 8:53 How does the market for transparently buying and selling 100% clean electricity work?
• 18:44 Is the market for new forms of RECs already regulated?
• 22:37 Our Guest's Personal Journey!

Transcript

00:00:03 Chris Sass 

Your trusted source for information on the energy transition. This is the insiders guide to Energy podcast. 

00:00:14 Chris Sass 

While we're. 

00:00:15 Chris Sass 

Making insiders guide and merging. I'm. 

00:00:16 Chris Sass 

Your host Chris Sass and today with me is Scott case, the founder of Zeta Watts. Scott, welcome to the podcast. 

00:00:23 Scott Case 

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it, Chris. 

00:00:26 Chris Sass 

I'm excited to hear what you have to say. I I love having fellow entrepreneurs on the program. You've got an entrepreneurial background. What exactly are you working on? 

00:00:38 Scott Case 

Well, I've spent the last 30 years of my life building all kinds of different companies, from very large scale businesses. I was the founding chief Technology officer of priceline.com, which is probably the most well known business. I've worked in global public health and I've built SAS businesses and e-commerce platforms. And I found myself over the last few years. 

00:00:58 Scott Case 

Looking at both climate change and specifically clean energy, and the biggest challenge that I think we're facing is we need to double or triple the total supply of of electricity in the United States and probably globally. 

00:01:14 Scott Case 

And we need to do it really, really fast. And so the question is, what are the big barriers to accomplishing that goal and how do we figure out how to create the leverage we need to get there as quickly as we possibly can? It all should be carbon free energy, and we have the scalable technologies. 

00:01:33 Scott Case 

To do that. 

00:01:34 Scott Case 

So the key thing is figuring out how to overcome some of the bottlenecks in the process. 

00:01:41 Chris Sass 

OK, so that's a pretty bold statement, a pretty ambitious plan. You're a technologist. You you make software. So where did the two cross? Where is the intersection between technology and getting this clean energy that you're talking about? 

00:01:56 Scott Case 

So part of the big challenge is on the one side for project developers, it's very clear that in order to get a project fit. 

00:02:05 Scott Case 

Against one of the biggest barriers is they need a long term off take agreements. They've got to have somebody who's willing to buy. Typically the power and then on top of that by the environmental attributes, the renewable energy certificates that ride along with that power over some period of time, 10/15/20 years and so. 

00:02:25 Scott Case 

Project developers owner to get their financing, they need to have these off. 

00:02:29 Scott Case 

Acres on the other side of our market, you have corporate buyers. We focus on the voluntary corporate market, many of whom have set very ambitious net zero clean, you know carbon carbon goals in addition to a big component of that is their clean energy programs and their goals there. 

00:02:49 Scott Case 

And when you unpack the corporate side of the equation for the vast majority of corporations, they're really focused on an emissions. 

00:02:57 Scott Case 

Problem it's less about how they procure their electricity and more about the emissions from the electricity that they buy in the market today and in the United States, 60% of our electricity generation on average is fossil fuels still. So if you're a corporate buyer of electricity, you've got this big emissions footprint. What do you do about that? 

00:03:18 Scott Case 

How do you demonstrate that you're mitigating that that usage of electricity? 

00:03:25 Scott Case 

And so for us, we saw the opportunity from a software perspective to say the current model for bringing both the buyers of that clean energy and the project developers together is an over the counter. 

00:03:41 Scott Case 

Bilateral market that on its best day is opaque. It's really, really high friction. It's very complicated. And So what we've done is take a software mindset and a product approach and said, well, what could we do to make it as easy as possible for that corporate buyer to mitigate their scope 2 emissions from their electricity. 

00:04:01 Scott Case 

And make it super easy for project developers, who often have a portion of their project they've got off take for let's say a PPA with either a utility or another large buyer, but they have a piece of the puzzle that they need to finish from an off take standpoint, how can we bring those together? 

00:04:20 Scott Case 

Commoditize the product on both sides of the market and ultimately use software to figure out how to distribute and allocate. 

00:04:29 Scott Case 

The volume from the project developers and the demand volume from the customer side, so we can breakdown this bilateral transaction that tends to be where the friction lies and where it fails. 

00:04:42 Chris Sass 

A couple of things you said made me wonder. 

00:04:46 Chris Sass 

First one is that this is really about environmental and not about energy, because what what I've seen is when energy prices low, people went to the cheaper energy. So when solar became cost effective, it became popular. So I'm I'm not convinced totally there. But the second part that comes. 

00:05:02 Chris Sass 

In mind is, you know, some of the SEC and public companies and filings and things that are going to be responsible for you brought up scope 2 admissions. How do you play in that? Because this sounds very reactive. It sounds like I need to make sure that I'm clean is it, is it a paper trail that you're offering or what? What? What's helping me meet my SEC filings or even my state and local filings? 

00:05:23 Scott Case 

So I'm going to, I'm going to press hard on the the emissions part of the the challenge. If you're a large corporation and you have load across the entire country, right? So you've got offices and places, maybe have data centers or manufacturing facilities. Your your load is distributed over maybe the entire country at some point. 

00:05:45 Scott Case 

Certainly multiple Isos and RTOS and what you're really trying to do is to figure out how do I demonstrate that I am mitigating the electricity. I'm using day in and day out and the best way to do that is to bring new generation online commensurate with that usage. So an example. 

00:06:05 Scott Case 

If I'm currently using 100,000 MW hours a year of electricity, what I'd really like to do is to bring 100,000 MW hours of generation online, let's say over a 10 year period. So I can say, hey, every time I'm using a MW hour, there's another MW hour could be anywhere in the country that's general. 

00:06:23 Scott Case 

Creating a clean, clean electricity which in in the ideal case is is basically mitigating. Otherwise natural gas fired MW hour for example. So that's the corporate emissions problem they want to bring this new generation online. 

00:06:38 

But hold on. 

00:06:40 Chris Sass 

Let me let me interrupt here. Yeah, so not every MW of energy is created. 

00:06:45 Chris Sass 

SQL. 

00:06:46 Chris Sass 

Right, so a clean I might be somewhere where there's a lot of solar in create a clean energy MW wherever I happen to be. Maybe I'm in Arizona, but if I'm in, you know, the the Northeast maybe doing it and not having the same capacity. How how do they really offset each other, cause they're not actually the same, are they? 

00:07:02 Scott Case 

No, that's and that's one of the biggest challenges is it's. 

00:07:07 Scott Case 

It's even more complicated if you if you go to what is the current standard for when you say I buy 100% clean energy, which is I buy an unbundled rack from a project that was built five years ago. That's not even in the same market, right? So we think about these as incremental steps. And you're right, a MW hour. 

00:07:27 Scott Case 

That is from a project that is generated in a in a heavy renewable market, let's say in Texas and ERCOT is not the same as a MW hour consumed in West Virginia, which has a very high emissions footprint. 

00:07:43 Scott Case 

The the highest level matching would be to look at the emissions footprint in both places, both where the load is and where the supply is. The challenge is is that we are nowhere near ready to calculate the data required to to answer that question today. It's moving in that direction. 

00:08:02 Scott Case 

But we're not there yet. So what is the next best thing we can do? Well, it turns out that in Texas, it's about 50% fossil fuel today. So bringing new generation online in Texas to clean the Texas grid is just as valuable. If you look at the entire picture of what we're doing. And that's what we believe at Zeta Watts is so important is this. 

00:08:20 Scott Case 

Say if 100% of all the electricity that was used in America was generated carbon free, we wouldn't be having a discussion about what the emissions footprints would be or what 24/7 CFE would be looking like. What we'd be saying is we're already there. So from our perspective right now in the transition probably for the next 20 years. 

00:08:42 Scott Case 

Bringing new generation online pretty much anywhere in the country much, much faster is a high impact action to take and we ought to do as much as we. 

00:08:50 Scott Case 

Possibly can got it. 

00:08:53 Chris Sass 

Alright so. 

00:08:55 Chris Sass 

What? What's this market look like? If if you're a company and you're trying to do this, where is this market and how does it work? 

00:09:02 Scott Case 

So at Zeta Watts, we've created something called an additionality rack. We've really given a name to something that has been that has happened occasionally, but we're trying to make it happen a lot more often. So an additionality rack is a competitive offering to a virtual power purchase agreement and what it is, put simply. 

00:09:22 Scott Case 

It's a fixed price forward contract to buy just the environmental attributes from projects that are currently under development. 

00:09:32 Scott Case 

So these are I'm going to buy a 10 year strip of 100,000 MW hours a year at a fixed price from a project that is currently being developed somewhere in the country. Or if I'm looking to match up geographically, I can specify what ISO or RTO is there and so we facilitate this through something we call the a rec market. 

00:09:52 Scott Case 

And so the marketplace allows buyers to set prices and volume of demand and it lets project developers provide their projects and how much generation they expect to have online in 2025, 2020, 6/20/20. 

00:10:10 Scott Case 

It's all matched against the COD, so everything is designed to be pre COD contracts in place, which is where we define the additionality benefit. The corporations get the benefit of that additionality and that that high impact that they're having by helping bring in new project onto on. 

00:10:29 Scott Case 

Online on the grid and at the same time, they don't have to deal with the complexity of a virtual power purchase agreement, which? 

00:10:36 Scott Case 

I don't know how many of your listeners understand that, but that's a very high, high complexity, high risk asset that requires both the buyer to fully understand what they're getting into for the next 10 years in terms of marking their books to market and dealing with the clean energy supply changes in the overall wholesale market. 

00:10:57 Scott Case 

In addition to what the project developer needs to manage on their side. 

00:11:01 Chris Sass 

And how big a market do we need to have this be market kind of pricing to have some value of having it be a market? How many participants does it take to really get this going? 

00:11:11 Scott Case 

We're already seeing a market form with dozens of participants. It's probably gets really, really tight at hundreds in the market. What you're seeing on the corporate side is that there are probably 1000 to 2000 public corporations that are going to have to file those disclosures you mentioned as part of the SEC. 

00:11:33 Scott Case 

Companies like Microsoft and Google and Amazon, in their public filings, they're going to tell you exactly what their usage is, and they're going to tell you about having put in place, power purchase agreements or virtual power purchase agreements and how impactful those are. You know, Microsoft's report says something like 13.5 gigawatts of new generation that they've built. 

00:11:53 Scott Case 

Well, if you're anyone of the other, let's. 

00:11:56 Scott Case 

I don't know 1800 to 1900 companies that haven't done anything like that, your storyline looks pretty weak, right? You're maybe you're saying I've got 100% clean energy, but you're buying wind racks from Texas wind farms that were built 10 years ago and that's your overall strategy. That's not going to cut it because investors are increasingly. 

00:12:16 Scott Case 

Holding the standards higher for themselves about what they believe is high impact, we expect the greenhouse gas Protocol and STI to start to change their expectation. 

00:12:26 Scott Case 

And as you pointed out, there are municipalities that are already raising the bar, like in Boston. The Berto Act requires you to either buy compliance Recs in Massachusetts or you have to demonstrate that you're bringing new generation online and commensurate with what your usage is in that market. 

00:12:46 Scott Case 

And so I think the trend line is going to move towards the desire and requirements to have higher and higher impact. And the SEC disclosures are gonna allow you to compare company to company, not just on what they're using, what their missions are, but if they've set a goal, how are they making progress towards that goal and the most impactful. 

00:13:05 Scott Case 

Way. 

00:13:06 Chris Sass 

So how mature is this? You, you mentioned dozens of folks doing this today. Where are we on? 

00:13:10 Chris Sass 

The maturity scale. 

00:13:11 Scott Case 

We are very, very, very early. We anticipate that this is an S curve, but we're probably two or three years away from really starting to scale. Even the current PA market is relatively small. I think there are probably 120 to 130 deals done in the United States. 

00:13:27 Scott Case 

On the voluntary side, but that is growing at a very rapid pace because more and more corporations are looking for solutions like additionality, Recs to as you pointed. 

00:13:40 Scott Case 

Out to prepare for their required disclosures that are coming from the SEC starting in 2026 for large companies in 2027 for others and most companies are starting to plan for what are they going to publish and how are they going to be evaluated in doing so. And so we're seeing more demand. 

00:14:00 Scott Case 

For these kinds of solutions. 

00:14:02 Chris Sass 

And then how do they interact with this? Is it? Is it a portal that they log into or how? How does this all work? Look, walk me through a user experience please. 

00:14:11 Scott Case 

Sure. So as a customer? 

00:14:14 Scott Case 

You can go to a rec market AR EC market.com. You set up an account is totally free and we take you through a planning cycle. We ask you about how much your current usage is and then we talk about maybe what your existing programs might be and what your gap is. And we then give you a comparison between if you were to buy additionality racks. 

00:14:34 Scott Case 

At a fixed price, how does that stack up against, let's say, continuing to buy spot wrecks on an annual basis? 

00:14:41 Scott Case 

We then help those typically sustainability leaders at these companies understand what their strategy is going to be. Are they going to try to get to 100% right away? Do they stagger them and and sort of eat through it over let's say 25% a year for the next four years and they sort of add strips along the way. So they come up with a strategy. 

00:15:00 Scott Case 

Energy. They typically then will bring that and have the budget conversation with their their financial counterparts. The CEO's, in some cases, maybe even their boards. And then ultimately you can make an offer in the a rec market. You specify exactly what volume you want, what's the price that you want, if you have any other geographic constraints. 

00:15:23 Scott Case 

I only want this in CAISO, or I'm interested in ISO New England. 

00:15:27 Scott Case 

We then aggregate that demand up. 

00:15:30 Scott Case 

You give us an expiration date, typically 90 days, and we have dozens of project developers with each of which have probably 5 or 10 different projects in play that are interested in selling into our market. 

00:15:44 Scott Case 

We set the price if the project developer is interested in selling at that price, then the deal. 

00:15:49 Scott Case 

Done. If the if the project developer says I I wouldn't sell at $10.00, but I'd sell at 12, it gives the opportunity for any of our buyers to buy it. Now at that alternate price and Zeta Watts sits in the middle, so it's not a bilateral market. We don't match the project developer and A and a a customer or a a corporate buyer. 

00:16:09 Scott Case 

We are the seller to that corporate buyer and we're the buyer from the project, which allows us to create more liquidity in the market because we can distribute that demand across three or four projects that might only have 10 or 20% of a project available. 

00:16:26 Scott Case 

And we can distribute the risk back to the to the corporate side by aggregating that demand and not having a single project exposed to a single customer. 

00:16:36 Chris Sass 

Now is this a temporary long term temporary problem? Meaning that once we have renewable energy resources for everybody, we don't need this market you're establishing. So this is a a window of opportunity that to do this. 

00:16:50 Scott Case 

I would really be delighted if I could stand here and say in 20 years we will be 100% renewable energy in the United States. I don't think that's possible absent some kind of, you know, miracle technological breakthrough that we can't even spell yet, let alone what we see on the drawing boards today. I believe we're going to continue to have. 

00:17:10 Scott Case 

Fossil fuel generation as a part of our fuel mix well through 2050, in which case there will always be a need for corporate buyers to navigate and mitigate some portion of their emissions footprint along the way. 

00:17:28 Scott Case 

And the main reason for this is that the demand side on the on the load side of our usage of electricity is going to continue to scale at a rate that is going to outpace our ability to deploy new generation. And so we've got these competing lines of, hey, we want to electrify our entire transportation system. 

00:17:48 Scott Case 

You know, EV is up and down the entire transportation stack. Well, that's going to dramatically increase the total load. We're electrifying almost all of our built environment. So when we put all those heat pumps in, they're going to use a lot more electricity across the board. 

00:18:04 Scott Case 

And despite a lot of hard work and efforts, we are going to face massive heat waves and giant disruption in in the climate change and our resiliency to that is going to require more electricity if it's hotter everywhere for longer, guess what we're going to put a lot more air conditioning in and that's going to use a lot of electricity. 

00:18:25 Scott Case 

So I see the load side of the equation doubling or tripling over the next 30 to 40 years, and as a result the pace at which we can bring new generation online isn't going to be able to keep up. So I think we've got a very nice business, but if we could be out of business in 10 years because we solved this problem, that would be an excellent outcome for us. 

00:18:44 Chris Sass 

And I guess if it's a market, is it a regulated space, is this gonna be regulated or is it already just by definition regulated? 

00:18:52 Scott Case 

We use the same underlying system that the registry system for the renewable energy certificates today, so we're not creating anything new at the kind of the accounting mechanism for how a MW hour of electricity and A and therefore a renewable energy certificate gets minted. 

00:19:12 Scott Case 

All of that rides along the same systems and the same basic regulation around. 

00:19:18 Scott Case 

What we've introduced it is just a a way to buy that is an audit trail for the corporate buyer to be able to say I put this contract in place with Petawatts and I have the contract, one or more contracts in place between Zeta Watts and the project developer prior to the project going into COD. 

00:19:38 Scott Case 

With attestation from the project developer stating that the financial value of those contracts were were material and getting the project developed. 

00:19:48 Scott Case 

And finally, the marketing rights along with it, so that the corporate buyer can say hey, actually I helped get these three projects off the ground. They're not saying I was the sole off taker for it, but they are being able to point to those physical assets and say our contribution as an off taker played a role in bringing these projects online. 

00:20:07 Chris Sass 

Got it. All right. One, one question I'd like to ask, especially with new and emerging technology is what are some of the risks that would keep? 

00:20:13 Chris Sass 

This from happening. 

00:20:15 Scott Case 

Probably the biggest risk. 

00:20:18 Scott Case 

Is and continues to be the way the credit worthiness of all the participants in these bilateral markets and the and the the way that that risk is assessed. 

00:20:35 Scott Case 

It's not. It's not as functional because you've got project developers on one side that are having to manage all these different relationships with the with corporate buyers and you have corporate buyers who are not experts in figuring out how to write these projects. 

00:20:51 Scott Case 

So the challenge for us is demonstrating the creditworthiness. 

00:20:58 Scott Case 

Of zoats that's sitting in the middle and how we balance the market. So for example, we have our corporate buyers put up a 10% deposit against their entire contract once we fill it well, that gives us an asset that demonstrates some credit worthiness and sort of skin in the game right out of the gate. 

00:21:18 Scott Case 

Our terms are set up front. There's no constant negotiating back and forth. We set our terms upfront for both the buyer and for the project developer. 

00:21:27 Scott Case 

And on the project developer side we have a similar mechanism on the deposits from their side. If they're delayed, there are consequences for them that are again structured and upfront. So everybody understands how the markets going to work. We have to get that just right today. 

00:21:43 

Because it's the. 

00:21:43 Chris Sass 

Margin like like a margin call. So if their credit worthiness changes, does the amount of that 10% get increased that people are putting? 

00:21:50 Scott Case 

Down. No, it's more about. It's about their their risk. 

00:21:56 Scott Case 

On a on 1/4 to quarter basis and it's more about the risk, the perceived risk that a project developers that their financers have, right. So it's this cascading thing, right. They have a debt provider that's looking at the project developer that's looking at the off takers that's looking at the corporate buyers. All that stuff has to flow through and our job is to make that. 

00:22:17 Scott Case 

As smooth as possible, and to demonstrate that we can create the level of liquidity on both sides of our market that both sides need without the complexity of. 

00:22:29 Scott Case 

More bilateral contracts and insurance and things that drive basically drive them to blow up, and the deals fall apart. 

00:22:37 Chris Sass 

All right, so I think I have a pretty good idea of what you guys are doing. It seems fairly exciting. I I guess your personal journey, how did you get from, you know you you started by saying you got Priceline and along the way you you did health, now you're an energy. What was this journey like? What drove you to this? 

00:22:54 Scott Case 

I spent a lot of time over the last 20 years with a number of peers of mine who had been working in environmentalism, climate change, a little bit around the clean energy side of the equation. I didn't see an opportunity for me as an entrepreneur that I thought. 

00:23:14 Scott Case 

Maybe there's an opportunity I could build a business here that would be impactful in solving this problem, and I found myself about 2 1/2 years ago at one of those moments as an entrepreneur, I was like, OK, it's time to go, you know, start the next thing. This is pre the IRA. 

00:23:30 Scott Case 

And I started to sort of unpack. Well, what's the state of the world with climate change and where are we headed from an energy standpoint? I read a book which is similar back here called speed and scale by John Dorr, and he applies a tool called okr's objectives and key results. He basically deconstructs the spti curve and says, OK, here's all the stuff we've got to do. 

00:23:53 Scott Case 

And I came away reading the book and said, holy ****, we've got to electrify everything as fast as possible, and we have to bring all this new generation online. Like, what's the hold up like? What's the big bottleneck in there? And that was my journey was sort of I spent. I must have had 150 conversations with really smart energy people. 

00:24:13 Scott Case 

Project developers, financiers, banks, other types of off takers just to understand like what were the big gaps and even post IRA, it's a the R has accelerated some things and created a much simpler set of vehicles for finance. 

00:24:33 Scott Case 

But everything comes down to who's going to buy the energy from these projects for the next 10 to 20 years like that is the open core question to the financing. And so when I saw that, what intrigued me about it was that if that's the the crux of it, it's not about can we build these things. It's not about are there enough project developers out there. It's not even about. 

00:24:54 Scott Case 

Whether there's enough capital to finance. 

00:24:56 Scott Case 

It's really about who's going to be the customer on the other side and for me, when I saw that it was corporate buyers that could play an kind of an outsized role in this, I've spent my entire career working with large corporate buyers for all kinds of different sorts of products. And I thought, OK, this is an area that I understand. 

00:25:18 Scott Case 

I may not be an expert on the energy side of the equation, but I understand a lot about how large companies have to make these. 

00:25:24 Scott Case 

Kinds of decisions and what? 

00:25:25 Scott Case 

What their challenges are, and if we could bring a software mindset approach to it, I think we have a real opportunity to simplify things for the corporate buyer and bring more of these projects online as a result, as an entrepreneur, we may fail at any given time. There may be some like Achilles heel that we haven't discovered yet. 

00:25:45 Scott Case 

Along the way, but I always try to focus. 

00:25:50 Scott Case 

From a personal standpoint, is this worth failing yet right, this is probably the most important thing humanity could be focused on right now. And so if I can do a tiny little part of maybe making a little tiny dent in this thing, it's worth the energy. 

00:26:07 Chris Sass 

Alright, well, that's pretty passionate. That's what I'd expect from an entrepreneur. I I guess you said in one of your comments that were early on. 

00:26:16 Chris Sass 

What does that mean in terms we walk to a user journey is the platform up and are people using it today you said dozens, so does that imply that there's a a beta and alpha? 

00:26:27 Scott Case 

Yeah, there's there's an alpha right now. We are. We're heading towards getting our first transaction done in the second-half of this year. Most of our buyers, as I mentioned, are looking out at 2026 sort of timelines. And so we're lining up the projects now are getting to a place where they're reaching that level of COD and I expect to have our first set of transactions. 

00:26:48 Scott Case 

Done before the end of the year. Uh. 

00:26:50 Scott Case 

The project developer side, if you've got project developers in your audience, we're accepting submissions of projects right now where you get to specify your generation and the price that you're looking for, just for the environmental attributes. And so we've been building that out. We started in Arcot. We've just started to add kaiso to the mix and but it will take projects from anywhere in the country. 

00:27:12 Scott Case 

And and then we're looking, we continue to have conversations with various types of corpora. 

00:27:17 Scott Case 

Operations. Typically our sweet spot is companies that are buying between 100,000 and 500,000 MW hours a year in electricity. They they're big enough to have this class of problem, but they're too small to have the sophistication of a team to navigate a power purchase agreement or a VPA. 

00:27:38 Chris Sass 

And just out of curiosity about how big is that market of those that size companies, how many tend to be out there? 

00:27:44 Scott Case 

Ballpark in that in that market, there's probably somewhere between 5 and 10,000 companies that are in that as a as a C and I buyer in that zone on a national footprint basis, we work with a lot of channel partners. 

00:27:59 Scott Case 

Both energy brokers and energy consultants and then sustainability consultants. And so that's. 

00:28:07 Scott Case 

The the size is there in that five to 10,000 range and then there's where they are in their journey and there's probably only if you know hundreds of companies right now might be 500 to 1000 that have done something like a power purchase agreement or a VPA. And so we're starting with helping them make it a lot easier for them to do more. 

00:28:28 Scott Case 

That, as the rest of the market comes. 

00:28:31 Scott Case 

1. 

00:28:32 Chris Sass 

Well, Scott, this has been fascinating. I appreciate you taking the time to share with myself for my audience. Thank you so much for joining us today. 

00:28:38 Scott Case 

Now, thank you so much, Chris. I really appreciate it. 

00:28:40 Chris Sass 

For audience, we hope you've enjoyed this content. If you did, don't forget to subscribe and absolutely like or add comments, ask questions and we'll see you again next time on the insiders guide. 

00:28:50 Chris Sass 

Energy bye for now.