The digital circuit breaker and why it matters

The lowly circuit breaker was first patented by Thomas Edison and
hasn’t been updated much since — until Atom Power CEO Ryan
Kennedy came along and made a digital version. In this episode,
he describes the basics of the digital circuit breaker, the ways
it’s making a difference in the EV charging market, and its
gamechanging potential.


(PDF
transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


There is perhaps no building block of the electricity grid more
fundamental, ubiquitous, and overlooked than the humble circuit
breaker. Every electronic device that is attached to the grid
runs through a circuit breaker, a device that automatically shuts
off current in the case of a fault or surge.


Currently, though they have become extremely reliable, circuit
breakers still rely on technology that was patented by Thomas
Edison. They operate purely through electromechanical forces,
with no digital control.


My guest today, Ryan Kennedy, is the first person to develop,
patent, pass UL testing with, and commercialize a digital circuit
breaker. It is solid state — that is, it has no moving parts —
and current is controlled entirely through semiconductors.


In addition to being faster and safer than electromechanical
equivalents, each digital circuit breaker contains within it its
own firmware and software, which can be programmed to emulate,
and thereby replace, any number of other software-driven devices
like demand management systems, load controllers, meters, and
surge protectors.


Kennedy's company, Atom Power, is currently focused on the
electric-vehicle charging market, offering smart load balancing
and management from a centralized circuit board, replacing the
need for complicated hardware and software in the EV chargers
themselves.


But the ultimate applications for a digital circuit breaker are
endless. Everywhere they are attached, a grid becomes a smart
grid and appliances become smart appliances. If even a
substantial fraction of today's circuit breakers could be
replaced with digital equivalents, it would bring unprecedented
visibility and control to millions of distributed energy devices,
enabling all sorts of sophisticated demand management.


I was extremely geeked to talk to Kennedy about the basics of
circuit breakers, their application to EV charging, and the many
possibilities that lie beyond.


Alright, then. Ryan Kennedy, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much
for coming.


Ryan Kennedy


David, thank you for having me.


David Roberts


This is awesome. I'm so interested in this widget and its
possibilities, but I think to help people get their heads around
it. Before we get too deep into anything, let's just start at the
most basic level. For those of us who were humanities majors and
never took any electrical engineering or anything, let's just
talk about what is a circuit breaker. I know people are very
vaguely aware of circuit breakers. They are in a circuit box in
your garage. Occasionally, your power goes out, and you wander
out to your garage and flip switches around and try to see what
works.


But, I think that's probably the extent of most people's
knowledge. So let's just start there.


Ryan Kennedy


Circuit breakers, electrically speaking, are one of the oldest
products on the market. They first were invented, at least
patented by Thomas Edison to show you how far back they go. But,
they're effectively a method of interrupting the flow of
electricity when things go wrong. Too much current, short
circuits, things like that. The purpose of the circuit breaker is
to simply open the circuit when those things happen and protect
from fire, primarily.


David Roberts


And, presumably, protecting the appliances and the things on the
other end of the wire, too right.


Ryan Kennedy


Generally, that's the assumption, though I don't know that it's
necessarily the explicit purpose. I think the more explicit
purpose is to prevent fire. That could mean your equipment may go
bad, in the process, but generally speaking, to prevent fire and
hazardous conditions from electricity.


David Roberts


And so, every appliance, or device, or anything that uses
electricity from the grid is connected to the grid through a
circuit breaker. Is that true? Is that a universal rule?


Ryan Kennedy


That's right. Actually, the easiest way to visualize that is to
think about the home or apartment, where you have a panel with
breakers in it that typically open the front door and you can see
breakers in there, and you flip switches and things go wrong. So
basically, you have a big power feed from the utility that comes
into that home to that panel, and then out of that panel, power
gets distributed through each one of those little circuit
breakers out to individual loads in your home, such as hot water,
HVAC, lights, receptacles. That scales out. Commercial buildings
and industrial buildings and data centers are the exact same
thing.


I mean, there's more breakers, and they often get bigger, but
it's the exact same architecture across the entire planet. Or the
circuit breaker always is the thing that sits in front of the
thing that consumes energy.


David Roberts


Right. And so, the purpose of these things is to basically shut
off current if something goes wrong. How do they do that
currently?


Ryan Kennedy


There's a couple of different ways, but the most predominant way
is it gets into a little bit of engineering speak. So I'll try
not to dive too deep, but basically, it's through thermals and
magnetics. So, there's kind of two situations you would have.
Let's just pick on the home a little bit because the same
problems scale upward to commercial, industrial buildings. When
you say, plug in way too many things into the outlet, the breaker
will trip. And that's tripped through thermals, means that too
much current is flowing, things get hot, and some expansion
happens inside of the circuit breaker. And, mechanically
speaking, it flips a spring, and causes the breaker to open.


David Roberts


So it's not a heat sensor. It's literally the heat expands
something physical, and the physical change trips something.


Ryan Kennedy


It literally expands the metal inside of the breaker to open it
up. That's what happens. The second, there's two methods—that was
thermal—the second is called magnetic. That mechanism, it
operates physically the same way. The actual springs and levers
inside of the breaker open up the same way. But what causes it is
different. So, magnetic happens when you have, say, a short
circuit. Don't do this at home, but if you took one of your wires
from your home and just put it into a pool. Lots of current flow
all of a sudden, really really fast. That's called a short
circuit.


And you don't want to wait for things to heat up because that's
when really bad things happen. So what happens is an enormous
amount of current starts flowing through that circuit breaker,
creates a pretty quick magnetic field that basically pushes the
metals apart inside of the breaker to open it up, as well. So
it's very much a passive device in the sense that there's nothing
in them that say, oh, that's that, or this is that, so,
therefore, I need to do this. It's a reaction of the metals
inside of the product itself. It's quite an old technology,
actually.If you open up the circuit breaker, it looks like a
mousetrap condensed.


David Roberts


Yeah, tiny little mousetrap that's basically set off by heat or a
magnetic field. You think about electricity these days. You think
about all our sort of digital devices and digital controls. And
it's a little bit wild that on every single line going to every
single device, there's this mousetrap, just so old fashioned.
That always struck me. It's so weirdly old fashioned. A little
piece of metal with, like, springs on it that springs shut to cut
off your electricity. So it's very mechanical. Let's say
electromechanical, as you say.


Ryan Kennedy


Yes, very established technology that is, in today's world,
relatively ancient from a technological standpoint. But, to
achieve those basic results of circuit protection, they work. The
basic results of circuit protection.


David Roberts


Right. And it's passive, as we say, just responds to
perturbations, and, I guess you would say, dumb, in that, it
doesn't know there's no awareness of what's happening or why it's
happening. It's just metal expands, it flips, it cuts off.


Ryan Kennedy


That's correct.


David Roberts


So there must be millions and millions and millions of these
things. I mean, if there's one of these things between every
electrical load and the grid, there must be billions out there in
the world.


Ryan Kennedy


Likely, yes. I think your first number was correct. Millions and
millions and millions.


David Roberts


So what you've done is make a digital circuit breaker, which
works differently than the electromechanical. So why don't we
just start with if it's not a physical reaction, if it's not a
physical thing happening inside this digital circuit breaker,
what is happening? How does it work?


Ryan Kennedy


We can dive into the technical and how it works, and then it'd be
good to talk about kind of why we're doing that. So first, the
technical. And the reason I say that is because, well, breakers
work. Why do anything to them? Right? But technically speaking,
what we've done is we've created a digital circuit breaker. More
specifically, we call that a solid state circuit breaker. What
that is is saying, hey, instead of using mechanics or mechanical
devices, meaning like metal on metal, the things we just talked
about to conduct electricity through a breaker, let us use
semiconductors instead.


So semiconductors are a broad ranging topic, but basically means
that you can control current with a small digital input much like
you can on your phone or computer, et cetera. But scale that up
to power and say well, let's make a circuit breaker with
semiconductors so that you can now interrupt, in the case of
protection, the circuits when bad things happen with
semiconductors instead of mechanics. With that, we overlay. So,
what happens when you go to a semiconductor approach? It is very
much an analog, as if you said what's the difference in a rotary
phone versus a smartphone?


It's making that leap all at once. Because now with digital
control being semiconductor control at the breaker, it means that
you can now put smart things inside of the breaker and make it do
things and add value that it typically didn't have. That's what
we're doing.


David Roberts


I just want to stress on the core function of shutting off
current in danger. Even on that core function, it's faster. It's
better and faster than a mechanical device. Is that right?


Ryan Kennedy


That's correct. By multiple orders of magnitude. So to give you
an idea, we are, roughly speaking, about 3,000 times faster than
most mechanical breakers in the market. That equates to two
things. One is safety. There's some old footage of us, that we
don't do so much anymore, of slapping hot wires together to kind
of show that safety function. Don't try that at home either. So
that's one thing which is actually quite important when you scale
into larger buildings because there's more energy and more
utility and short circuits can be explosive events. So it
definitely helps in that regard.


David Roberts


And you say conventional circuit breakers work, but we should
note that there are faults, there are fires, there are arc—what
do they call them? Arc.


Ryan Kennedy


Arc flash.


David Roberts


Whatever—yeah. They're not 100%.


Ryan Kennedy


That's right. What's interesting about—not so much in residential
although this can't happen in residential—but when you scale up
to, like, the larger buildings, commercially in the industrial
space and especially in data centers where the utility services
are very large, you can have catastrophic events from short
circuits that are balls of fire. Now, the breakers will open, but
that doesn't mean a ball of fire didn't happen in the process.
Right. So that does happen. I mean, in the worst case in my in my
past life, I used to design buildings and also worked for, you
know, a contracting firm.


So I've seen, particularly in one instance in a high rise
building where there was a short circuit in the electrical room
on, like, the 19th or 20th floor, and it blew the doors off of
the electrical room. And these are like commercial grade steel
doors that got blown off the electrical room. So it's an amazing
force that can be had when you get into the bigger buildings.
But, I digress a little bit. It certainly eliminates that
problem. Let's put it that way. Go into a semiconductor just
purely based on speed.


David Roberts


And that's just because a digital signal travels at the speed of
light. Right. And it's just faster than any mechanical reaction.


Ryan Kennedy


Yeah, inherently a semiconductor is going to be, like I said,
including propagation delays and things like that within the
compute and sensing, we're around 3000 times. And to give you an
idea, that's in the microsecond range as opposed to millisecond
range or millisecond spurl in the case of mechanical circuit
breakers. Now, okay, micro milli. But electricity does move
virtually at the speed of light. So arc flash propagates not
quite that quick but pretty quick. Whereas that time really
really matters. So yeah, the impact to the safety is effectively
arc flash just doesn't happen on the output of our product, even
in the largest utility services.


David Roberts


So you get the basic function of the circuit breaker is faster
and better. But then, as you say, you have this device that has
semiconductors in it and you can put other stuff in there too. So
maybe just describe like, I know what a circuit breaker looks
like. It sort of fits in the slot in my circuit box, so I have
the vague idea kind of what it looks like. What does your thing
look like? Is it the same size? Does it, what is it composed of?
What does it look like?


Ryan Kennedy


Today, what we have on the market doesn't look so much like what
you would see in your home. It looks more the size of a
commercial grade circuit breaker. So can't fit in the residential
panel yet, with a strong emphasis on yet, but we do have a
similar form factor of commercial grade circuit breakers.


David Roberts


And is that just the difficulty of shrinking down little
computers and stuff? I mean, is it that simple?


Ryan Kennedy


Not quite the compute, it's more the power semiconductors that
actually do the switching. So we're on this incredible curve that
probably could take up a large portion of this conversation but
also simplify it to basically mean that the world of power
semiconductors is advancing quite under the hood actually of
everything else that's happening. Power semiconductors are what
enable electric vehicles to be as efficient and as effective as
they are. Power conversion and solar—UPS has lots of things power
conversion related. They are advancing at a pretty rapid rate
from a power density standpoint. Power density meaning like how
much power you can actually pack into that power semiconductor.


So power density is going up, size is getting smaller. That plays
into our own internal strategy as a company to optimize the form
factor in the coming couple of years to where it becomes much
more of a universal product that can fit into existing panel
boards. But today, we have—it looks like a small box that fits
into our—we manufacture panel boards as well, so you don't have
to figure that out, but we figured all that out for you. Make
panel boards, circuit breakers, everything as a whole system.


I always say that there's two major components to a solid state
breaker. There's a brain and a heart. The brain is the control
system, the stuff that software defined, that makes the thing
work, provides cybersecurity, things like this. And then there's
the heart, which is the power semiconductor that the control
system attaches to. Yeah, very much like a phone, in a way, in
the sense you have a brain, you have a heart and a phone as well.
And that combination creates a pretty powerful component. And
electrically speaking, that's what we're doing in this space is
really enabling far more than we used to.


David Roberts


Right. So maybe one way to think about it is that
electromechanical, old school circuit breakers, only had hearts.
And now you've added a brain to the equation.


Ryan Kennedy


You could see it that way. Yeah, absolutely.


David Roberts


And so if all these things are digital and if everyone has a
little computer in it, basically, if we could think of these as
tiny, tiny, tiny little smartphones, I know one thing that comes
to people's mind whenever I discuss digitizing anything is
security, cybersecurity. So if your power in your home or your
commercial building or whatever, if every bit of it is running
through a tiny little computer, people, I think, naturally
wonder, like, what happens if they get hacked or someone takes
over, can control the power flow through my entire building, et
cetera, et cetera. So how do you deal with security?


Ryan Kennedy


Ultimately, circuit breakers are life safety devices. That's the
core function. That's the phone call and the phone right? It has
to make the phone call.


David Roberts


Right.


Ryan Kennedy


So we're life safety devices. So when you shift from purely
hardware to software defined hardware, in any industry, the right
approach is that cybersecurity is the number one priority in
software. That's been our approach the whole time. Now, there's a
couple of ways to dice that. One is to say, the way we describe
it is, there's Stuxnet and then there's hackers. And so we want
to guard against both, and we call it Stuxnet as in, if you know
what that is, that was the uranium enrichment thing that read all
about that some other time. But the point is, in that case, the
biggest threat is to make a critical device be something that
it's not supposed to be or do something that it's not supposed to
do.


So that is priority one to say, okay, above all things, the
breaker can't be made to be something that is fundamentally not
and create an unsafe condition. So how we're attacking that is
really good. I'll just tell you that, There's some secret sauce
there that effectively amount to there's built in safeties that
are still digital, but you basically can't get into under any
circumstance. So that's priority one. And then the next priority
says, okay, well, if we solve that, which we have, then the next
one is to say, well, how do we keep folks from coming in and just
say, shutting power off or doing funny things.


Shutting power off is probably the number one funny thing there.
But how do we prevent that? So, I'd like to say that in the world
of software, there's this standard out there, and you follow that
standard and you're good. That is not the case with cybersecurity
for anybody. It's always evolving, and you're always trying to
tackle it and address issues as we go along. But the core things
that we do is end encryption on both software and hardware, which
means that we have encryption elements physically on the breaker,
encryption elements physically on our onsite management tools and
cloud software.


So that's actually quite critical, is to have the physical
encryption as well as the software based encryption. There's many
ways you could go about cybersecurity in the sense of many
different entities have cybersecurity standards, but the one that
we're headed towards now is called FedRAMP. That's really the
direction we're headed from a standard standpoint. That's to do
work for the federal government. Things like this, you have to be
FedRAMP compliant or certified. So that's the direction we're
headed. We're not certified, yet. We anticipate later this year
we will be. But nonetheless, that's kind of how we've addressed
it. That is one of those areas that I wish there were this, like,
gold star. You got that. So everyone's good.


David Roberts


Right. Because there is a gold star in the circuit breaker
safety. The heart part, the UL standard is pretty well...


Ryan Kennedy


Yeah, UL is kind of our FDA equivalent in the world of circuit
breakers. Yes.


David Roberts


Right. And you guys have passed those tests?


Ryan Kennedy


We have. We're the first and only company in the world who have
ever done that, for a solid state digital circuit breaker.


David Roberts


Yeah. And one thing, I don't know if we mentioned this, but this
made an impression on me when I first learned about it, so I just
want to throw it out there. I think when people think of
networked devices, they think it won't work without the network.
So it's just worth sort of emphasizing, here, that every one of
these circuit breakers has the firmware and the software and the
operating system inside it. So it is, in some sense, a self
contained little machine like, it does its thing, even absent
networking.


Ryan Kennedy


Yes. We just call that fully autonomous. So, yes, they're fully
autonomous devices.


David Roberts


Right. And one more thing I wanted to mention about the move from
conventional to digital and circuit breakers is that this
eliminates a lot of equipment that traditionally goes around
circuit breakers in sort of commercial and high value areas. Sort
of safety equipment that kind of gets larded around circuit
breakers. So maybe just talk a little bit about that, sort of
like the kinds of things that you've consolidated into one device
here.


Ryan Kennedy


Yeah, absolutely. So it's worth stating that the easy part of the
power distribution world or electricity is that, as we said,
there's a circuit breaker that sits ahead of everything that
consumes energy. The hard part comes in where if you look at,
well, what do we actually do with electricity? All electrical
things require really three things. So any application of
electricity requires protection, visibility, and control. This is
related to HVAC, certainly related to EV charging. In the case of
HVAC, you have protection in the sense of a circuit breaker that
feeds the HVAC system. Inside the HVAC system, you have a control
mechanism that actually controls the flow of energy in its own
little way. And then you have visibility either through software
or through the thermostat. You could say the same thing for
basically everything, electrically speaking. EV chargers,
certainly same thing. Every EV charger that's been built out
there, with the exception of Atom Power, is fed from a breaker,
always, inside the EV charger, whether it's a pedestal or
wallbox, there's visibility and control. And you could say the
same about elevators and many, many other things that we use
electricity for.


So basically the way we look at it is what do we do with
electricity? Well, we want to protect it, but we also want
visibility and control. So what we've done is basically to say,
okay, well, let's offer superior circuit protection, but let's
also have the ability to have visibility and control because,
well, that's what we do with electricity. All within the circuit
breaker. And so I think you asked a sort of broader question like
what are we doing that's kind of adding some of those things in.
Inherently being a semiconductor device, it's easy to control the
flow of energy. As simple as that sounds, that's monumental
because it is extraordinarily difficult to make a circuit breaker
that can universally control energy. Meaning, universally, as in
the home or in the data center, or in a commercial building or
industrial building with the same device.


David Roberts


Yeah, we should pause here, just to add, because I don't know
that we ever actually mentioned it, but physical circuit
breakers, old school circuit breakers are also designed for a
specific voltage, right? They're sort of locked into a specific
voltage. Whereas if you're doing it with computing power, you can
adjust to different voltages with the same circuit breaker. Is
that right?


Ryan Kennedy


So, think of it more as different amperages.


David Roberts


Amperages. Sorry, I get those confused.


Yeah, it's okay. So if you go to, name your hardware store. If
you go there and you go say, "I want to buy breaker." The
questions are going—your menu, I should say, is going to be,
well, do you want a 15 amp, a 20 amp, a 25, a 30, a 40, 50, 60,
etc. And then, you know, you, you buy that product for what it
is, say, call it a 30 amp breaker to feed my, I don't know, hot
water heater. That's going to be fairly typical. It's always
going to be a 30 amp breaker forever and ever and ever. Which
means from a UL standpoint and a safety standpoint, you can only
put that on 30 amp circuits.


Right?


Ryan Kennedy


I will say, yeah, that is an interesting benefit that I think
evolved along Atom Power's way, which says, well, now that you
become a digital circuit breaker, you can effectively be a lot of
circuit breakers in one, which is what we do. And you can program
our circuit breakers from 15 amp all the way up to 100 amp. And
it's you all listed for each increment in between. So that's
pretty powerful when you consider, roughly speaking, it depends
on your metric. About 90% of the breakers on the planet are 100
amp and less. So we're hitting a huge market with one single
product.


David Roberts


Right.


Ryan Kennedy


So that's certainly one thing from a protection standpoint, and
thank you for reminding me, on that. That is a feature I often
gloss ever, and it is unique for what we're doing. But the
visibility, obviously, through the software we have and the
ability to see the breaker and control the breaker is the other
thing. And to be able to tell the breaker what it is. And I think
that's the key thesis within Atom Power, which is to say, well,
let's not just create a digital breaker, but let's create it in a
way to where you can tell the breaker what it is instead of
buying a breaker.


Well, because you have to for protection and then having to buy a
specific built appliance for the application that you need to
perform, like EV chargers are a strong symptom of that.


David Roberts


This is a perfect segue here because the first time we talked
years ago, I think you were sort of messing around with big
commercial facilities and industrial buildings and kind of a
little bit all over the place, but you just got $100 million
investment to do, specifically EV charging applications. So tell
us why all these things we're hearing about digital circuit
breakers, why they're specifically well suited to EV charging.


Ryan Kennedy


So you're right about the earlier engagements we had, with great
customers, were in the industrial space, primarily. Certainly
prior to the investment, we saw a need, a major pain point, when
it came to electric vehicle charging at scale. So charging
vehicles has been around quite some time. For the longest time,
it's been relegated to if it's outside of the home, to be candid,
often optics put a couple here, a couple there just to have them.
Right. But as we've progressed, particularly in the 2020s, here
we are seeing, and we saw this is why we're in this space is we
saw this, that there were some major, major problems with
charging at scale.


Meaning like, instead of a few chargers put in hundreds into a
single facility or complex, heck, even tens, but certainly in the
hundreds, things become really problematic really fast.


David Roberts


And that's fleets. We're talking about basically fleets.


Ryan Kennedy


Fleet, multifamily, and hospitality.


David Roberts


Right.


Ryan Kennedy


Yeah, anywhere where you're going to have lots of chargers. But
yeah, particularly fleets, always need lots of chargers.
Multifamily, as well. So the problems start becoming quite
extreme in those cases. To give you an example of what I mean by
this, we, we have a project up in Queens that is roughly now
it's, you know, close to 700 charging stations that's going into
generally the same location that is on the same, you know,
substation grid, network, etc. If you do the math on that, you're
basically connecting up to between six and 7 megawatts of
potential load onto that grid, just in that.


So appliances don't solve that very well, which is more or less
what level two chargers are today. There are appliances that sit
in front of the car and you plug it in. When you start talking
about that scale, it's really critical that your infrastructure
is the smart thing that can actually solve pain points such as,
hey, how do we not do that?


David Roberts


How do we not have a bunch of cars charging at once and overload
basically the substation, because you could fry a substation if
everybody like if you had 700 chargers going all at once.


Ryan Kennedy


Absolutely. Things like that. Things like me as a customer, how
do I not spend the amount of money that you would otherwise spend
on the infrastructure alone to make that happen? Meaning
transformers, wires, switch gear, things like that. And then,
with that much energy, how do you not just say, don't overload
the grid, but how do you actually, effectively, energy, manage in
real time against things like peak loads, or peak demand, or time
of use and keep energy cost as low as you can and charge during
the right times of the day and when there's a grid event and
things like this.


All that requires real time infrastructure intelligence.


David Roberts


Right. So the EV charge has to be networked with one another.
They have to be communicating with one another, basically. Is
that not something they can do now? If I'm looking at a fleet
with a bunch of chargers today, are the EV chargers just
freestanding, isolated, or did they talk to one another now in
other ways?


Ryan Kennedy


Yeah, oftentimes they are. But there's where the problems really
started was in the fleet, because that started becoming apparent,
right, the more that they were putting in. To answer your
question, can EV chargers today, outside of Atom Power, talk to
one another and do some level of energy management? The answer is
certainly, yes. That's the start of the conversation though, the
devil in the detail says, okay, put that in and make it code
compliant with our national electrical code and get the inspector
to sign off on it and guarantee the billing owner that that's
going to operate always, no matter what, safely. There's where
things get problematic.


So, if you are the life safety device and you're already
connected and you got to buy a breaker anyway, for each EV
charger, things become so easy to do. Now it's built into our
panels breakers. It means the National Electrical Code to the t.
Inspectors have no problem with it. And there's a lot of things
that become super easy all of a sudden. So without going into a
ton of complexity, being the infrastructure, being the breaker,
being the panel board where the breakers sit, makes it super easy
to solve those major pain points with very little effort from the
customers' standpoint.


David Roberts


Right. And I think the way to think about this, and kind of what
turned the light bulb on for me, is if your intelligence, your
software, your coordination, et cetera, is in the circuit
breakers that are in the circuit board, that means the EV
chargers themselves can be dumb. So that like the things that are
out there in the parking lot can just be dumb conduits. Right.
Because the control is elsewhere. And this is something that's
always struck me about the EV charging space. It's just like you
have these, today, you have these like really incredibly complex
high power computers sitting out in parking lots. Which always
kind of struck me as a little bit insane, that normal customers
are interacting so directly with something so expensive and kind
of complicated.


Ryan Kennedy


Well, you're hitting on the next pain point, which is, again, at
scale that becomes very problematic that your most expensive
asset in that ecosystem now sits in front of the vehicle,
typically outside.


David Roberts


Right.


Ryan Kennedy


So the second question outside of the infrastructure cost is how
do we not do that? Can the pedestal or wall box be—wallbox not
the brand, but box...electrical—can that thing be very low cost,
low maintenance, zero maintenance, preferably? Whereas if it did
get damaged, really nothing happens, other than I can easily
replace it. And the answer is yes, because... Yeah, you're right.
And once you become intelligent infrastructure and you sit safely
back in the electrical room, the pedestals that have the cord
sets on them become very dumb in air quotes. But the system is
really smart.


David Roberts


Right. I'm curious what sorts of things having this kind of
central intelligence, controlling multiple EV chargers can do. We
mentioned it's going to prevent, whatever, 700 cars from charging
at once. That's the kind of baseline it's going to prevent so
much power from running through the system that it fries the grid
it's on. But what else can you do with that sort of central
computer control?


Ryan Kennedy


Yeah, so I would say there's a ton, but the highest value ones
are going to be certainly in energy management that we've been
talking about here that relates more to than just to saying, hey,
prevent 700 cars from charging at the same time. It says, hey,
you know what, let 700 cars actually charge at the same time, but
let's intelligently distribute so that they can all get a charge
and not cause major problems and major electrical bills. So
that's one, I mean, I would say the other one is it is extremely
easy to create a campus environment as well with the system. It
kind of relates to what we spoke of earlier. Like the network
connectivity is completely different from any other system, as in
like it's really easy to do. So it's very easy from a campus wide
perspective to say, hey, how do I connect this campus of chargers
to a single system, single pane of glass that also does energy
management, that also saves on electric bills, things like that.
So things become very easy through that network piece.


There is another element to it that says, well, kind of goes off.
The programmable breaker to some degree is when you buy an EV
charger today. This is another pain point. Again, at scale, it
can sometimes also be a pain point, not at scale, but when you
buy one today, it's fixed. In other words, level two charging,
which is most of the charging, goes all the way up to 80 amps.
All right, so just take that as a number. Well, if you buy a
charger, it's going to come in several different flavors. You can
get a 24 amp charger, you can get a 32 amp charger, a 40 amp, a
48 amp, and then on rare occasion an 80 amp because 80 amps kind
of hard to do for various reasons. There's just less of those.


But nonetheless, what you buy is what you buy and you're stuck
with that. So if you buy a 32 amp charger, which is most of them
on the market, that's it. You're not going to get 48 amp, you
know, that a Tesla needs. You're not going to get 80 amp. That a
Ford f 150 needs. You got 32. So you're probably picking up this
a little bit, that with a programmable breaker now, on the other
hand, what I can do is we can just simply go the full range of
charging through the same product.


David Roberts


Right.


Ryan Kennedy


You're buying a full level two now, regardless. You just tell it
what it, again, tell it what it is. And that can happen real
time. You know, I could start off as 48 amp charger and then move
up to an 80 amp charger, you know, a couple of years from now as
more demand picks up for adm charging with the same
infrastructure with no stranded assets. And that's absolutely
critical. So let's say that's another one.


David Roberts


So I got the intelligence is in the circuit board and they've got
these sort of dumb chargers out in the parking lot. So like a
bolt could pull up and charge at that charger and the circuit
board knows the right amperage level. And then an F-150 could
pull up to the same charger and get more charge because the
circuit breaker knows.


Ryan Kennedy


Correct. But it's not enough to say, because you were mentioning
network a minute ago. It's not enough to say, well, a
programmable breaker alone solves that. It solves a major chunk
of it, which says, well, I can now program my system to be 80
amp, not 48, yes. But there's another element to it which says,
well, to do that, then again, think of that example of 700
chargers. Now, if I, if I boost, say, these chargers over here to
80 amp, say, call it 50 of them, right?


David Roberts


Right.


Ryan Kennedy


Now, the entire system has to communicate amongst itself because,
well, they sit on the same utility to say, well, oh, those have
80 amp now. So we need to see how we can spread the rest of them
intelligently, so these other folks get a charge while these get
an 80 amp charge. So it's still a system level network event.
Right. And we make that easy and out of the box effectively.
Whereas it becomes extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible,
the way things have been done today.


David Roberts


Right. Because I guess if you're buying multiple ones today,
you're just sort of bricolaging them together piece by piece.


Ryan Kennedy


Correct.


David Roberts


Seems a lot more like people are being asked to kind of wing it a
little bit. And as I'm sure you know, as having interacted with
customers, if I'm just like an owner of a hotel or whatever, I
don't want to know, you know what I mean? I don't want to have to
think about this much. I just want to plug something in and have
it work. There's not going to be a lot of electrical systems
management from these customers.


Ryan Kennedy


You are absolutely right. And that brings us to probably, I would
say, the core of how we're personally selling, but also what
we're seeing the market in this space look for, which is EV
charging is one of those unique animals you mentioned,
hospitality, where it's unique in the sense that if you offer it
and it doesn't work, the perception of your facility becomes
different.


David Roberts


Right.


Ryan Kennedy


If the lights out or the TV doesn't work in the hotel room or
something, it causes nowhere near the impact that your EV charger
not working does. There's various reasons we think that is. But
anyway, so what's happening is and you're right, those hotels,
especially hotels, don't want to think about this stuff. So being
able to package it up in a way that is highly effective out of
the box and by the way, extraordinarily reliable. Because we're a
breaker now, we're falling to a completely different standard.
That becomes absolutely critical that you have a super reliable,
super easy...I don't have to think about energy. I don't have to
think about demand. I don't have to think about this stuff, from
a hospitality, or multifamily, or fleet perspective...that
becomes a very powerful thing. But it's a culmination of kind of
all the is stacked on top of one another. Smart breaker panel
connected, dumb pedestal system level approach.


David Roberts


Right. And this is like if I'm the hotel owner, do I just plug
and play and this thing runs itself forever...or is Atom
involved, somehow, in monitoring and running? Are you involved in
operations at all? Once you install these things, who takes over
operations?


Ryan Kennedy


I'd like to say we have a singular way of selling, but it's such
an early market still that we don't. We sell all the way down to
just hardware. All the way up to full managed services. So we
have a 24/7 network operation center within our facility that we
monitor key customer assets that we have service agreements with,
particularly in hotels. That's one of those sectors that ask for
that frequently because the hotels don't...they want to equate EV
charging rightfully so to WiFi. You don't think about the router.
Yyou don't think about gigabit or whatever that is. It needs to
just work. I can connect to it, and it works. That's it. That's
all I care about, rightfully so.


David Roberts


And one other question about these EV control systems. Obviously,
the first thing on everybody's mind is the sort of EV facing part
of it, managing which vehicles are charging and how much at what
time. But of course, if you have this intelligence and software
you also could think about communicating with the grid. And so, I
wonder how much, because once you are getting up to 700 whatever.
I don't know why we picked that number out. 700?


Ryan Kennedy


It's actually a project we have up in New York.


David Roberts


Oh yeah. Well, you've got 700 vehicle charging stations and 700
vehicles charging, potentially. You've also got a fairly large
dispatchable, at least somewhat controllable load, which seems to
me could be quite helpful on some congested grids. So how big of
a piece is the grid facing intelligence in these things? And I
guess some of that depends on utilities and whether they're ready
to do this kind of thing but I just wonder are you sniffing
around in that space?


Ryan Kennedy


I would say the way we're approaching it is, to answer your
question, your hunch is dead on. That is a major utility concern
at scale is to be able to have some level of at least visibility
if not some level of demand responsibility in those events. We're
not starting there, really. We're starting to satisfy what
customers need right now, like, what are the most important
things for them in the sectors we're in. So we see that as an
evolution and it is happening. We are engaged in multiple
utilities, just to put that out there. But today it's not so easy
to say okay, well let's control that.


What first needs to happen is customers need to start utilizing.
The utilization picks up, that utilization picks up more. Then
those discussions, the real, like, "what do we do about it"
discussions will start happening with utilities we predict.


David Roberts


It's going to force the question. If you've got 700 vehicle loads
coming on and off your grid I mean, you kind of really can't just
ignore that.


Ryan Kennedy


That's true. But with the evolution of electric vehicles and the
adoption rate, all 700 aren't going to be on today. I think
that's the point is, like, as more and more vehicles come onto
that system—in relatively short order the next couple of
years—then things become more apparent. Right. Then things become
more potentially problematic for the utility. And we do expect
that there's an engagement with the utilities, at various levels,
for some sort of a demand response tie in. We certainly see that,
but we're not day one pitching that as part of—the product is
capable, absolutely capable—it's just the connection rate from
the vehicles to the chargers has to pick up more and more and
more and then eventually that will begin discussions once it
becomes problematic for the utility, but not before it becomes
problematic, typically.


David Roberts


Yes, that sounds right. So you're out there now selling these
systems, these EV charging systems to fleets and campuses. I'm
sort of curious, who are the customers so far? What sectors were
most eager for something like this to exist?


Ryan Kennedy


Well, they initially fleet, so think parcel pickup delivery
fleet. That's where we kind of started off our sales, was there.
Multifamily is a close second at this point because they have the
same pain points. They both need to have lots of chargers and
they both have pain points associated with, well, effectively
becoming a gas station. Trying to minimize costs associated with
that.


David Roberts


Right. Yeah. There's one other thing I forgot to mention when we
were talking about this earlier, that since you mentioned
multifamily, I'll just throw it in here. Another sort of
interesting application of this is if you own condos or apartment
buildings or something, you might want to have certain chargers
dedicated to certain people. Or you might want to have certain
chargers that are available only in certain times of day. Or you
might want to have one charger that's shared between two people
who live in your apartment building. And all of that is of
course, you can do, if you have this central control system, you
can do a lot of micro fiddling with the individual spaces.


Ryan Kennedy


Yes, already built in, super easy to do.


David Roberts


And so the EV charging space is a very obvious application of
this. A place where some central control of multiple devices is
most obviously needed, and the demand is rising very quickly and
that whole industry or set of industries is in really kind of
like it's a crazy time of ferment in and around that stuff... But
as we emphasized early on, as I emphasized when I wrote about
this back in 2019, really there's no end to the possibilities
here because the way I think about it is every single device on
the grid is connected through a circuit breaker. And so if
circuit breakers can become smart computing devices, then
basically every device connected to the grid becomes smart or at
least somewhat smart, without having to put all that programming
and smarts and computing power into the appliance itself. You're
putting the intelligence in the connection to the grid. I don't
know, the more I think about this, the more it kind of blows my
mind. That what you could do, eventually, if some substantial
portion of the millions and millions and millions of circuit
breakers in the country become smart. I don't know, it just seems
to open up like the sky is the limit kind of thing. So I'm just
curious, like, you're moving into the EV space for obvious
reasons. It's hopping. There's a serious demand for precisely
this sort of thing. But do you have plans?


Like what's next after that? Because I could just think of a
million different...


Ryan Kennedy


We do, as I think, hopefully, the listeners have picked up and I
think through our conversation here, it's probably become
apparent that EV charging for us is viewed as an application of
the breaker, but not as the thing.


David Roberts


Right.


Ryan Kennedy


Much like many other things are. That will be scaling in the near
future, in a way that is unique, in a way that is very easy and
primarily of which becomes truly universal. So we are, you know,
evolving product into a form factor that, you know, like we're
universal today from a product standpoint. In other words, you
can put us in any building, anywhere, it doesn't matter, same
product, and we're capturing 90% of the breaker market doing
that. But we're in our own panel. As we evolve, that will shift
into a form factor that fits into most panels, at least in the
US. And can be adapted for the European markets and add further
ability into the product to effectively be able to tell it what
it is.


So we see a future. That the breaker that you have to buy anyway,
instead of going and buying a meter or a control device or EV
charger or industrial control, whatever it is, you just tell the
breaker you're that thing, and it does it. That's the world we
see. Now at scale, at extreme scale, I always like to think in
kind of polar extremes, extreme scale of that, because
consumption defines the grid, not the other way around, is you
effectively could have control of the entire grid.


David Roberts


Yes.


Ryan Kennedy


Also obsolete about 80% of the electrical products on the market
at extreme scale.


David Roberts


That's the other thing I was thinking about is like all those
things you're talking about building into the circuit breaker.
Those are entire freestanding industries, like long standing
industries. This is a huge amount of stuff, consolidation here,
if nothing else.


Ryan Kennedy


Correct. I think what we're trying to do is—I hate to use the
phone analogy, but it's very similar, but in a little different
way—is that we are looking to electrically speaking, unify the
applications and unify the customers into one platform. I mean,
many other industries have done that most visibly, the phone. The
applications and the phones get used by everyone. And we want the
same to happen in the electrical space. That there's this massive
gap...that there are more electrical products on the market than
probably any other industry because just over time, as the
industry has evolved, we've just made specific things for
specific applications for specific customers.


David Roberts


Right.


Ryan Kennedy


That's what EV chargers are. They don't have to be that way,
right? The breakers have always been there, but it's not thought
about much. So let's make that thing that actually does it since,
well, it's part of the electrical system, right? You have to buy
it anyway. It needs to be there. So let's make that the universal
thing. And I think that's where you mentioned the investment. I
think that's probably where Atom Power differentiated. Because if
you were going to go make that kind of investment, the 100
million into, say, an EV charging company, the problem is it may
not be a problem, but I mean, the way we look at it is, well,
that's all that they do.


The product charges a car, you can't use it for this, you can't
use it for that. That is it. That is what it's going to do.
Whereas Atom Power, it's like it being an application of a
universal device, means that, well, as we see this market over
here take off, we apply to that market and we see this market
over here, but we apply to that market. Why? Because all of them
require breakers.


David Roberts


Right? So, like a facility with a central circuit board
controlling multiple EV chargers, there's no reason that it
couldn't plug other types of ICEs into that same circuit board,
and it could coordinate all of them alongside the EV chargers,
with the EV Chargers. There's nothing EV specific about it.


Ryan Kennedy


Exactly.


David Roberts


I'm thinking about scale here. One of the things I think people
are starting to become familiar with are sort of smart panels at
home...like this company, SPAN, has the smart panel...which is
sort of doing in the home what you're talking about doing with EV
chargers at big facilities, which is just controlling loads and
balancing loads and timing things and all this kind of thing. So
in a sense, a smart panel like this, in the home, would kind of
make the home into its own little micro grid, right? This own
little independently managed micro grid.


And I'm curious about scale. What does it look like as you scale
bigger and bigger? Is it just stacking these little circuit
breakers on top of one another to eternity?


Ryan Kennedy


That's actually a really good fundamental question, is that
breakers cover a large swath of land when it comes to electrical
space, right? They go all the way from, you know, technically ten
amps in the US. All the way up to 5,000 amps.


David Roberts


What does a 5,000 amp circuit breaker look like? Is it..


Ryan Kennedy


A refrigerator, basically.


David Roberts


Right.


Ryan Kennedy


But, but the point is, is like, you know, when you get into big
distribution systems, you start off with a goliath utility and
you finally work your way down to the small, what's called Brandt
circuit breaker. That basically means last breaker in the system.
That's where we play, is in that Brandt circuit breaker, meaning
the last breaker in the system. And like I said, 90% of those are
100 amp and less. And so you capture that market, you effectively
capture most of the grid, you know, at scale. So in other words,
it's like saying 100 amp and less, 90% of your loads are on that,
you know, and that's what we focus.


David Roberts


I mean, if you let your mind drift in sort of futuristic utopian
direction because I think about this stuff a lot. It's like what
sorts of things do you think could be unlocked? What sorts of
things do you think could become possible? When it's not just,
you have this occasional smart load here and smart load there,
but suddenly the bulk, the majority of the loads on a grid are
smart controllable. I'm just curious what you think sort of like
the emergent big picture effects of that will be like what will
intelligence do for the grid on kind of the macro scale?


Ryan Kennedy


I think as you scale out, especially at the extreme end, you can
do some pretty granular things, like, neighborhoods,
electrically, are talking to one another, and that becomes
apparent where you can shed load without interrupting someone's
life and save a substation or save another generator from having
to come online. It kind of speaks to demand response, but in a
different way that says it's not brute force, shut things off.
Instead, let's all talk to one another and know that, hey, the
conditions look like this. This home is unoccupied, likely
because the electricity consumption is so low.


The imagination, there's no limit. This is the thing, again,
because the consumption of electricity is what defines everything
else...is once that becomes a unified platform and understandable
ecosystem made of billions of devices, that becomes very powerful
in ways that I don't think we've even thought about yet. But at a
high level it means that now, electrically, you can speak to one
another, and it's not like by home. It's not like my home is
pulling 20 kilowatts, your home is pulling 15. That doesn't tell
you anything. What does tell you things is the patterns of usage,
of EV charging, of HVAC, of hot water, of lights.


There's a lot there that, at scale, gives you a ton of
intelligence that you can do a ton of things with, that I think
the sky is the limit.


David Roberts


Yeah. At the base level, you are ensuring that every bit of
electricity that's generated is used efficiently.


Ryan Kennedy


Correct.


David Roberts


And that alone is going to just take a huge whack off. I feel
like the demand for new power plants and new capacity, you're
going to be able to avoid a ton of new generators and new, maybe
even new high voltage lines just by using the electricity you've
got.


Ryan Kennedy


Yeah. You just hit the core of the company, our company's thesis.
This is actually what we were founded on...which was in the
future, and we started in 2014, there was going to be this
probably once-in-a-century event of transferring a lot of
energy—think of that, not electrically, just pure energy onto the
grid.


David Roberts


Yeah.


Ryan Kennedy


So that's happened. It's certainly happening now. I think we call
that the energy transition now...But we had this thesis in 2014
where we said, well, you basically have like three options there,
because the grid can't sustain that level of what we were
predicting what's going to be transferred on the grid, primarily
by vehicles. You have kind of three options. You either create
more generation, somehow, even though we're reducing generation
through baseload like coal and natural gas, rightfully so. You
either do that, which is going to be really hard to do, or you
have large scale energy storage combined with solar, which we
have one of those, not both, solar, not so much energy storage,
or you have large scale demand response. But the way to do that
is through a universal method, not, not a disaggregated, like,
you know, thermostat adjustment or smart EV charger here, but not
there thing. It has to happen at a macro level scale, at the
infrastructure level. So this is fundamentally why we actually
started down this path, is sort of seeing that need in the market
in the future. And this was 2014.


David Roberts


This comes up over and over again. You talk about transferring
the heating load in the frigid Northeastern part of the country
to electricity. That's A) a huge load, and B) the timing of that
load is very different than the timing of the load it's adding
onto. And that's just, you either meet that with brute force by
building a shitload of new generators and power lines and
everything else, or you just got to get much much much smarter
about how you use the power you've got.


Ryan Kennedy


Yeah. And the low hanging fruit, at least conceptually, is that
you can be a lot smarter. But it's hard to actually execute on
that without a universal platform that fits all industries—which
at the end of the day, because again, everything's fed from a
circuit breaker—that needs to be the thing that is innovated on,
not a new appliance. But it's really hard to do that, super hard
to do. I could go into why breakers are hard to actually innovate
on, but nonetheless, it is the hardest path to pick.


David Roberts


But you're there for a big chunk of applications and can see, at
least in the future, a form factor small enough to go into
residential boxes. Right.


Ryan Kennedy


Yes.


David Roberts


And once it's in the box, it's programmable, which means it's not
the same thing. It can be, like you keep saying, it can be a
bunch of different—once it's in the box—it could be whatever we
need it to be as needs evolve. This makes such sense to me. Like
I remember when I first encountered it back in 2019, I was like,
yeah. If you have one kind of device that is required for every
single electric load, then why not make that the device that's
smart, instead of creating new smart devices for every different
kind of load. Why not just make the one lego building block,
that's the whole grid, make that smart and then you've got all
your smart devices in one? Seemed sort of like a smack your head
obvious kind of thing to me. So why are you still the only one
with a certified digital circuit breaker? Like I would think
other people would be moving in this direction sooner or later.


Ryan Kennedy


You know what's interesting is that, I will tell you this, we
were not the first ones to come up with the idea of a salt tape
breaker. The idea of that actually is quite old. Traced this back
to the mid-80s, of a semiconductor based circuit breaker by some
large companies. So two things. One, is, I think, the natural
question after that would be well, like okay, well, "why didn't
anybody do it?" So, I think, there was probably—let's start
there. There's probably a couple of things. One, is that the
circuit breaker space is an interesting one. It really is. And
the reason is because it is a super old industry. That's
basically dominated by four companies, across most of the planet,
who have all been building breakers for over a century each.
That's just kind of the nature of this industry. So by the way,
worst pitch ever. Hey, we're going to build a new breaker, where
four companies dominate the planet, and it's all hardware and
life safety, side note. But anyway, the point is it's a unique
industry in that sense. So I think probably there were some "The
Innovator's Dilemma" there a little bit because once you
establish a means and methods and that's how things are done,
it's really hard as a large company to move away from that and
disrupt your own business.


David Roberts


Yeah. And it seems like building tiny computers is very different
than building tiny electromechanical devices.


Ryan Kennedy


Yeah.


David Roberts


I don't really know very well, but it doesn't seem like a lot of
transferable knowledge.


Ryan Kennedy


It's definitely a different field. Right? I mean, once you say
hey, let's build a solid state breaker, you now get into the
realm of power semiconductors and physics that don't haven't
historically applied in traditional circuit breakers. So, there's
a few things. I think one is there were some enabling
technologies that evolved since the 80s like computing,
especially, in sensing and speed and power semiconductors,
certainly. But I think the other piece of that is a bit of "The
Innovator's Dilemma" that says, well, if I'm a company who's
making breakers, but I'm also a company who's making industrial
controls, and I'm also a company who's now making EV chargers.


David Roberts


Right.


Ryan Kennedy


It's so difficult, so difficult to say, well, why don't we just
make that one device.


David Roberts


And cannibalize all our other product lines.


Ryan Kennedy


Yeah, look, rightfully so it's difficult. Because if you've been
set up that way and your company evolved that way, I mean,
they're full of smart people... It's a structural challenge,
right, to go do that. So I think Atom Power came out would work
in a way, and that we're all from the industry. Me, specifically,
I was an electrician, so I kind of used to design buildings. So I
would like to say I think Atom Power had a view of the world that
was much more simple and holistic, that says, well, "why should
products be defined by the application? Why can't the product
define the application?" Which seemed just a natural question.
But then we started from there. I think that there are since Atom
Power, there are emerging, I would say, technologies within
established companies, as well as some startups who are trying to
do effectively what we're doing. My view on this, is we welcome
it because, coming from the industry, we believe what we're doing
is the right thing to do. We also know we can't service every
single customer base on the planet.


David Roberts


It's millions and millions, as previously discussed. Well, I'm
curious, if somebody, if another company makes a digital circuit
breaker, do we know already that it will communicate with yours?
Or does that remain to be hashed out? Like, is there a standards
are there standards issues here?


Ryan Kennedy


Well, it depends what you mean. I mean, there's a UL standard now
that basically Atom Power defined the path for and establish with
UL.


David Roberts


But I meant more of the software kind of intercompatibility. I
don't know anything about software, so I don't even know what the
question is. But insofar as this is meant to be a universal
system, is it going to all be operating on the same sort of
software protocols?


Ryan Kennedy


Yeah. Yes and no. So we do see a world where from an application
standpoint, in other words, if you're say a facility manager and
you have one pane of glass you're looking at for software,
interoperability between devices is going to be necessary.


David Roberts


Right.


Ryan Kennedy


So the way we structured our product is that the sort of core
firmware and stuff is proprietary because, well, it's hard to
open source that, because it's life safety, it's UL. It's like
there's a lot of whizbang stuff that happens in the breaker to
make it do what it does, but then the layer on top of that which
says, well, okay, well, let's set this up as an EV charger, that
layer of software, we're open protocol and API based, as well. So
you could tie even today, you can tie an existing building
management system into our software, for example, the way it
should be for other manufacturers if they come to the market. We
haven't seen you actually come to the market, yet, because, like
I said, it's super hard to do this, and I think it takes so much
time and energy. Atom Power is dedicated years to this, at this
point. It's a hard thing to do.


David Roberts


Was there any sort of public policy assistance or is this all
private investment, and are you making money now? I'm curious
because a lot of industries, when you're going up against a super
giant incumbent industry, you need help to cross those first few
humps. Has this all been private money so far?


Ryan Kennedy


It has, yes.


David Roberts


And you're out selling things for profit now. You don't feel like
you need any help.


Ryan Kennedy


Well, I mean.


David Roberts


Not like you're going to turn down help if...


Ryan Kennedy


We always welcome help, but in the form of investment, we're
capitalized for quite some time at this point, and our goal is to
not ever need to raise funds again. That's kind of... So we need
to be... We are post revenue, not pre-revenue, but as a company,
we have to get to a sustainable level of profitability, right?
Because from an investor, in a markets perspective, the markets
are very harsh right now on companies in the new energy space.
There's many publicly traded companies, especially the ones that
went this backroute, you can see this on right now, which is kind
of a Goldilocks scenario because it's a high growth market, yet
if you're not profitable, investors are punishing you on
valuation, specifically. So we need to become a very profitable
company in this space, but to sustain ourselves and to continue
to grow products, organically, right, and not continue to raise
money. That's what we're headed towards.


So my point is, it's really hard to make money in the energy
space, as the markets have shown. So the best companies are going
to be the ones who have a sustainable technology, but also a
sustainable business model to where they can take the profits and
continue innovating, to further advance and create solutions to
the major pain points that are out there. I mean, this is our
thesis. Like, we have to become a profitable company.


David Roberts


This is really fascinating to think about the sort of these lego
blocks that are really kind of composing the entire grid—thinking
about all of them getting smart is really just, for a sort of
grid geek—really lets your mind spin off and all sorts of
interesting directions. So, thanks, for taking the time and
explaining this all to us, and good luck in your next steps.


Ryan Kennedy


David, thank you. I really appreciate the conversation today.


David Roberts


Thank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free,
powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversation
like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at
Volts.wtf. Yes, that's Volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing
this work. Thank you so much. And I'll see you next time.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other
subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit
www.volts.wtf/subscribe