263 | Renewable Energy Technology is Getting More Effective with John Belizaire
Our guest this week on the pod is John Belizaire. John is the CEO of Soluna Computing, a company that is unleashing the potential of renewable energy and helping power plants sell every megawatt.
And a special thanks to members of the Awarepreneurs Community for sponsoring this episode!
Resources mentioned in this episode include:
Renewable Energy Technology is Getting More Effective: Interview with John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna Computing
NOTE: While it’s not perfect, we offer this transcription by Otter.ai for those who are hearing impaired or who don’t find listening to a podcast enjoyable or possible.
SPEAKERS
Paul Zelizer, John Belizaire
Paul Zelizer 00:02
Hi, this is Paul Zelizer, and welcome to another episode of the Awarepreneurs podcast. This podcast is all about the intersection of three things, conscious business, social impact, and awareness practice. Each episode, I do a deep dive interview with a thought leader in this intersection. Someone who has market tested experience that is already transforming. Before I introduce our topic, and our guest today, I have one request. If you could go over to Apple podcast or whatever app you're listening to the show on, hit the subscribe button do review, it helps tremendously. Thank you so much for considering it. Today. I'm thrilled to introduce you to John Belizaire. And our topic is Renewable Energy Technology is Getting More Effective. John is the CEO of Soluna Computing, a company that is unleashing the potential of renewable energy and helping power plants sell everyone. John, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Paul. Pleasure. I'm thrilled to have you here. And it's exciting that renewable energy technology is getting better and more effective, and you're just the right person to help us learn about that. Before we get into that, John, were called to wear printers and one of our core values is wellbeing. Like as we're working to make the world a better place that we're thinking about our own sustainability and don't burn ourselves out. If there was a resiliency practice that you lean on to help bring your best self to work to help you do this important work day after day, week after week, what would that be?
John Belizaire 01:35
Well, I have a three part process that I try my best to implement on a daily basis. In the mornings, I try to get at least 20 minutes of some form of exercise. Usually, it's calisthenics, or the spin bike or something like that, or some some weightlifting just to get the energy flowing through my veins and releasing, you know, the crazy thoughts in my head and just just just calm the body down. I also take a walk in the afternoon, usually about the, I'd say three o'clock, every day, I walk down the street, not too far. From here, I get a matcha come back and try to take in the sights or the crazy sounds of the big city here and live in New York. And the third thing, which is also a morning activity just before the day starts, I do journaling. And it's a three part exercise. The first is I write down what I call a rose, something that I am I thankful for something exciting that has has happened in the past day, a thorn, something that is hard, still challenging that I'm working through, and a bud and a bird is something I'm looking forward to that day. And or excited about. I also meditate at night. So that's how I end the day. But the first three I tried to get in as much as possible. And the meditation has gotten to a point where it's pretty standard for me now.
Paul Zelizer 03:15
I love that journaling the way you frame it. I've heard a lot of people journal but a rolls a thorn and a pod. Wow, that's great!
John Belizaire 03:21
I've been doing that for about almost three years now started during the pandemic. And just a way for me to deal with all the crazy thoughts that were in my head at the time. It was challenging time for me. Thanks for sharing that.
Paul Zelizer 03:36
So this space of renewable energy technology and innovative approaches to work towards sustainability - give us a little bit of the backstory. How did this wonderful man named John get excited about this growing space?
John Belizaire 03:52
Good question. So I like to say I'm not an energy guy. I actually am a software guy. I started my career over 25 years ago in the software technology space, helping the personal computer to become ubiquitous, if you will, started at Intel. And over the next 25 years, give or take. I've been an entrepreneur. Having left Intel i started a series of software companies focusing on solving real world business to business challenges with new innovative technologies. After my last company, now five years ago, six years ago now, a longtime friend of mine investor in several of my companies, a mentor really reached out and asked me to come and look at a project that he was working on. And I was puzzled because he doesn't do anything with software in his businesses is a private equity owner owns a bunch of companies and they're mostly industrial and format or product focus, etc. And he explained that he had a renewable energy company in northern half Africa had this problem where the energy was stranded, there was really no way to get the energy to the grid because it wasn't a very developed, developing area, part of the country. And they had come up with this way to combine renewable energy and blockchain and blockchain related computing to solve that problem. I was intrigued and went down to his office. And here we are five years later, I run a company that not only has solved the problem there, but really took that solution to lots of other places around the world. And I can tell you that through that journey, I not only am passionate about renewable energy as a huge potential solution to climate change. But I'm pretty passionate about how computing can be a real catalyzer to making that happen. And that's what I'm focused on today.
Paul Zelizer 05:56
You know, one, one of the ways you talk about it in your work, like, for instance, on the website, you talk about the excess energy problem, if somebody's like, What the heck is that? What is the problem, and and then Part B is, what does helping the crap that have to do with sustainability in the energy space help to help those of us who don't swim in this all day long every day understand what's going on there?
John Belizaire 06:22
Right. So the way to think about it is like this, when every one wakes up in the morning, they plug in their coffee machine or their toaster, or any kind of electronic device, you're probably plugged in or or unplugging their phone having charged overnight, we take for granted the fact that those electrons that are powering those devices just sort of make their way to our to our homes, to our offices to provide and support our economy. And the reason we take that for granted is because over the last many years, the grid has really played a very quiet and almost invisible role in making that true. But most people don't know how the grid actually works. The grid is a massive system that is a combination of energy generation plants, so facilities, everything from coal plants, to renewable energy plants, there's big power lines called transmission lines that move those electrons from that point where it's being created all the way across the state, and in some cases, the country to places where the electrons will be used. And then they come off of those big electrical highways, if you will, down to smaller, call them local roads and make them all make their way all the way to our homes. And that entire system is designed such that there's a exact match between the energy that's produced. And the energy that's consumed us plugging in those devices, if you will, at the end of the, at the end of the road there. Electric electric companies, and the grid kind of knows what that looks like. And it was built for the for there to be a direct relationship between those two elements, energy production and energy consumption. Over the last few years, as we have moved rapidly toward the renewable energy transition, more and more of that energy is sourced from power plants that aren't these big, monolithic fossil fuel powered facilities like coal plants that can be powered up by the grid operators, and provide that electricity on demand or, or exactly tune to the, to the to the folks that are using it. That's known as dispatching the power plant. Instead, what you're seeing is more and more of those power plants are sustainable power plants that use mother nature as a resource. So wind, solar, hydro. And when you shift to those power plants, the grid is no longer as in control as it was before. In fact, the scheduling of those of that power is really made by mother nature. And so many times. Most people don't know this, but a lot of the energy will be produced during periods where there's no one really interested in using it. Imagine huge turbines spinning at night in the middle of Oklahoma, and everyone in Oklahoma is asleep. Or huge solar plants becoming energized and sending electrons to parts of Texas, where everyone is at work but not at home for example. So there's a myth Some match between that production and that demand. And as a result, that energy has to be sent to the ground, the grid actually pushes back on the power plant and says, Hey, I don't need that power. Now, you can turn off your facility. And so that energy goes to waste, or, as we say, in our website is excess energy, with no place to go.
Paul Zelizer 10:24
Does that make sense? It totally makes it Yeah, I live in New Mexico. So I'm thinking of like, you could have this giant solar field. And in night, like those panels are doing nothing, they're just sitting there, right or exactly, or like, we were blessed to have a couple of very rainy weeks and, you know, clouds move in. And same thing at solar power or wind, like you have a very still day, and that can be completely disconnected. Maybe it's really, really cold, and people are turning under heat, making more hot drinks and with the electric stove. And yeah, I could really see how that disconnect could happen. So thanks for explaining that.
John Belizaire 11:00
So as the as the amount of that energy, and percentage of that energy increases on the grid infrastructure, that problem becomes more and more prevalent, where you have sometimes too much energy and sometimes not enough. And that's when you run into this, this wasted energy issue.
Paul Zelizer 11:19
Can you give us any sounds like how much are we talking about one person or the grid? Or is this like half the energy? Do you have any sense of how big an issue this is?
John Belizaire 11:29
Yeah, absolutely. If you look at it on an individual project basis, this is sort of a secret of the industry, if you will, up to about 30 to 40%, in some parts of the country, I learned today, it can exceed 50% of the energy that is being produced by the power plant, never makes it to the grid. And so on a grid level, it's probably on any given year, sort of in the, you know, high single digits percentage, if you will, but that's still a massive amount of energy. That's why I always express it on that individual power plant perspective. Because, you know, it's much more compelling, if you will, it
Paul Zelizer 12:12
almost reminds me of like, the food system or something like 30% of the food that we create in this industrial food system goes to waste, either raw, right yield, or it's just like, the wrong time. And people don't want cranberries. And they came in, you know, before that, right? Whatever, right? Yeah, massive amounts of food wasting. And when it wastes, there's all sorts of problems, including greenhouse gas from that food actually rotting. So it's a major, major problem that most people don't think about when they go to the store. Similar arrow got a capacity to use renewables to produce much more energy but when it's being produced can be a little wobbly or in unpredictable. And and when people really need it, let's say when it's 115 degrees and peep, everybody has their AC on, we might not be able to meet demand in that moment. And you're working right at that issue right there. So fair to say don't?
John Belizaire 13:12
Absolutely, yeah, that's exactly what we're focused on.
Paul Zelizer 13:16
So talk to us, how do you use renewable energy technology to do something about that? You know that? Yeah.
John Belizaire 13:24
So what we're doing is, you know, when I describe what I do, I tell people, you know, I'm really helping to catalyze a renewable energy space. And, you know, we're using computing to do that. I usually get a handful of questions. One of them is, Well, John, can't you just store the excess energy? And my response to that is, yes, you can store the excess energy, it's called a battery. Battery technology has made leaps and bounds improvement over the years. That's why now electric vehicles are now going to be way more possible and scalable in terms of an industry and so forth. But to build batteries big enough to absorb the amount of renewable energy that we're talking about, and do it at a grid scale way. It just isn't ready to do that. It's too expensive. They can't hold on to the energy long enough for it to be practical in terms of its application. You do you do have batteries placed here and there on the grid. And it's in that that usage is growing, and you're starting to see much larger batteries. But in terms of the ubiquitous footprint of batteries really addressing this. It's still not ready for primetime. The second question I have is, well, that example you gave John that Oklahoma example. Why can't you just send that energy down to Atlanta or something like that, where everybody's still partying? And they can use the energy? And I say, well, that's a great idea transmission is a fantastic solution to this point. album, but it can take years to build. And sometimes it never gets built because of all of the local and political and infrastructure challenges that have to take place or, or be dealt with, as you build lines that cross state lines, right. And so it's actually still very challenging for that to be a ubiquitous solution. Computing, though computing, on the other hand, is a fantastic user of energy. It lives in our pockets. As I said, one of the examples I gave of things you plug in is your phone. It's a powerful supercomputer. Well, there's huge giant facilities that are feeding that phone with content that are built and used every day. And if you look inside those facilities, there are two types of applications inside those facilities. There's what are known as real time applications. Those are the things that might be streaming of a movie, or an E commerce application or a an ERP system. And then there are background applications, things that are doing things to support those larger applications, everything from data and analytics applications, scientific research, AI and machine learning applications in a new form of computing, known as Bitcoin mining, or crypto mining, which is designed to provide security to some of these blockchain applications. All of that computing is not only huge ly compute intensive, big energy users. But there, they have this interesting property in that you can pause them, and then return to the process later when you get more energy. So imagine, we took all of those applications, those patchable applications, and we built a data center that was specifically designed just to run those applications. And we shrunk the data center down to a smaller building that you can combine into Lego blocks to create a large facility. And we that data center, that specialized data center, right to the power plant, right next door right at that location, and we plug it into the power plant. So when the power plant has excess energy, the data center wakes up, uses that excess energy. And when the excess energy goes away, that data center shrinks itself down and goes to sleep. That is a way more powerful, way more scalable, and available today. That's the difference between what we're doing, and what the industry has traditionally thought about how to solve this problem.
Paul Zelizer 17:41
This is just genius, John, and I think what I'm hearing is like the traditional solutions, people thinking about batteries, right storage of some kind or transmission, like take that energy from like, what's happened, there's a wind, you know, a storm in California and send it to the East Coast, because they're waking up there in the morning, like that kind of transmission infrastructures really expensive. So the kinds of traditional solutions, they're just not viable. And what you're doing are these modular units that you can put literally right where the power is being produced. And then you're combining that with technology to allow it to be able to scale up or scale down in any given moment, oh, the sun shine is shining really strong. And it's not being taken because it's on moderate day in the fall. And people don't need a ton of power, either air conditioning or heat. Great turn on the mining, turn on machine learning turn on other things that you can scale it up, scale it down right there on site, without some of those battery, or transmission lines, or some of the expense and infrastructure issues that so often get in the way in this space. Is that fair to say?
John Belizaire 18:55
100% Perfectly perfectly summarized Paul, thank you.
Paul Zelizer 18:59
Awesome. So help our listeners this is like if I'm a listener, I'm thinking okay, listeners and make it says is cool. All right. But like, how does that turn it on? Or ramp it down? That give me a little more information about that? Because I think this is key to your business model. Like what kinds of things can you turn on and turn off and how does like, you know, it's windy, two o'clock in the morning and there's a bunch in I am right next to a wind farm and so, like, how does that all work? Give me a little more detail. Yeah.
John Belizaire 19:29
So, the first part is, you know, finding the powerplant and so, we have a special system for identifying where in the country, the power reaches these negative levels, and then we can call a curtailment assessment. So wasted energy, excess power, all of those are described in a technical term and industry called curtailment And we go and we analyze for them, the amount of curtailment or wasted energy they've experienced over the last several years. And then we simulate for them, what it would look like to have a facility there. And based on that, they can see the amount of revenue they would recover if our facility was there. And then we design a solution, essentially, a physical footprint of the facility size, etc. And then we build the facility and operate it. So we connect it into the same substation, that's the facility that connects the power plant into the grid. And we connected that same point, which allows us now to sense where there's energy coming from the power plant. And when the grid sends a pricing signal. So it says, hey, the power, the price of power is a negative number. That means the grid is signaling to the power plant to either turn off or pay to send your power to the grid. And when we see that same signal, then our facility starts to ramp up. And we can also sense how much power the power plant is producing overall, we take a portion of that, that's the curtailed portion. And we use that to power our facility, sometimes we may need more than what the power plant is sending to us. And because we're connected right at that same point, we're able to draw power from the grid as well, to get us to a certain minimum level for our facility, in our minimum is way lower than your classic data center where our classic data centers have to be up five nines 99.999% of the time, we only have to be up at 5% of the time. And actually what we do is we combine a series of our facilities together using sophisticated software technology that we're building that allows us to mash those together so that we can run a job and actually move it to different facilities and create a higher than 85% experience. Now on average, we're in the sort of low 90s. But that's way lower than most data center facilities. The other thing we do is we have to manage the thermodynamics, we have to manage how big the facility is at any given time. And that's some software that we used to do that. And then all of that is put together essentially, in a turnkey solution or package for the power plant owner. And all they see is a contract to buy their power at a certain price with certain parameters on it, then we send them revenue. And that's really what they need in order to reverse the trend with their project. So that's how it all works.
Paul Zelizer 22:55
So if I was a power company, you all might come to me, let's say I was a renewable power company, you might come to me and say, Paul, we noticed that there are certain times when you know, it could be up to 15% of times when you could be earning revenue, but you're not because of this excess energy problem. And we will buy this energy you you allow us to put our modular data centers here and we will pay you right. So you can take that 85% And you're alive and getting paid. Maybe it becomes 98% or something much higher.
John Belizaire 23:34
Yep, that's exactly right, Paul, that's, you know, I like to I like to joke sometimes I drive my little Soluna truck around and I say, Hey, I noticed those wind turbines aren't spinning so much. The any issues there? And he says, Yeah, because because the dang grid, well, let me send all my power, you know? And I said, Well, I have a solution for you, if you let me build a data center right over there. I think I can address that problem for you. You know,
Paul Zelizer 24:00
and you're not to be clear, you're not asking the power company to buy these data centers, you're asking the power company to enter into contract and allow you to locate them there. And you'll pay them for the energy. So there's no immediate cost to them in terms of the infrastructure, you're just another revenue source that can get them paid a higher percentage. Is that fair to say?
John Belizaire 24:22
That's absolutely fair to say. And that's exactly how it works. So we really come to them with a turnkey solution to their to their wasted energy challenges. Awesome.
Paul Zelizer 24:33
So let's do this in a minute. I want to hear a little bit more about that solution and how you find companies to work with and what it looks like in terms of on the ground, how many companies are working with all the granular stuff that we love as social entrepreneurs. Before we begin, I just want to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. Do you have a business that's about making the world a better place and you want it to grow both in terms of your impact helping more people and your income so you could live a good quality life. If you do, I'd like to talk to you about some research for a second. When scientists look at what actually contributes to humans reaching their goals, the single biggest predictor, whether it's a wellness goal, or it's a business school, is what they call social support. In other words, a group of people who are on a similar journey, who can help you with specific strategies that work on that journey at the time and point of development that you're on, as well as emotional support for the ups and downs of that journey. Being a social entrepreneur has highs and lows, right? If you like that kind of support, but we're printers has a community called the AWARE printers community, over 270 really generous and really skillful social entrepreneurs. And that's what we do with each other. We share concrete strategies, as well as emotional support for the ups and downs of the journey. If you'd like to find out more, you can take a look at aware printers.com forward slash community. And thank you to everybody in the AWARE printers community who helped sponsor this podcast. So welcome back, everybody. In the second part of the show, John, we like to joke about putting on our social entrepreneur glasses. So like, if you were to take a snapshot for First of all, you said, you're in about year five, is that right?
John Belizaire 26:28
That's right. So the first few years of our life, we were developer, so we were focusing on being a power plant builder, and owner as well. And that's what we were doing in Northern Africa, then in 2020, COVID happened, and it was really difficult for us to travel back and forth to Morocco. And so we started thinking about decomposing the company, and looking at just the computing part. And thinking about if we can take that to other places where this problem existed, because it was it was right about time to start thinking about how we were going to scale the business and how we were going to support it and build it out going forward. And so we decided that rather than build, you know, build power plants all the time, it's much faster and more scalable to build computers where power plants already exist. And so after six months of research and talk to lots of power plant owners all around the world, it became clear to us that we should focus our energy on this solution bringing flexible computing to renewable energy power plants.
Paul Zelizer 27:39
It's genius. I never heard of this before. So like give us an example. How many power plants or power companies are you working with right now.
John Belizaire 27:50
So we we tend to focus more on the amount of potential energy we can absorb, rather than the number of individual companies, mostly just as a public company, the certain information we share, and we don't. So we we, we focus on the number of megawatts. So if you go to our website, it says, sell every megawatt. And so we started out with a modest pipeline of a few 100 megawatts. Now we are well over a gigawatt of power plant and renewable energy, resources that we can combine with and absorb. And that number is continuing to grow. That represents lots of power plant owners infrastructure funds that have asked us to look at one or more of their portfolio and assets in the US and beyond. What's also fascinating is we're talking to renewable energy development companies that actually don't have plants built, or they're planning to build some in places that they would have normally not invested and not built them out. But because they now have insight into this potential solution and the ability to combine with a modular data center like ours, they're actually looking at building more facilities. And so the contract that we will sign with them will actually be the trigger that drives the development of new plants. And that additionality is a concept in renewables whereby the off taking contract, you know, the ability to build a power plant went from zero to one, if you will. That's really what we're aiming for. As a business. We want to drive more renewable energy development in the world. And we want to make renewable energy, the primary power source in the world. And so scale is the way to do that. And partnering with renewable energy power plant owners that will actually build plants with our solution embedded in it. That's where the rubber meets the road for us, where we can really catalyze something at a global scale.
Paul Zelizer 30:12
That's such a fascinating, like, proactive way, because this is one of the major issues with renewables. Most renewables, think of solar, think of wind, these are not 24/7 365 days steady stay like a coal burning plant, you're just shoveling more coal. And as long as it doesn't blow up, it just keeps churning out, it turns out energy. And it turns out, you know, our greenhouse gases, but the energy part is very stable, whereas, you know, renewables oftentimes have more fluctuation, but I'm thinking about it from a owner of a renewable energy plan, this, that 6%, or 8%, or 12%, or 15%, of additional revenue, that I can have my plant, operating and sell every watt 10, or 12, or 15%, in a business is huge. And I can really imagine why this helps kind of tipped some of this scales in favor of going forward with renewable energy where maybe somebody has been hesitant. That makes a lot of sense. And thank you for doing that work.
John Belizaire 31:18
Thank you. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's really exciting. Because, you know, we imagined, you know, when we started our project, combining renewables and computing, as a vertically integrated approach was the way to go. Because imagine now, in parts of Africa, where you've got incredible renewable energy resources, wind, solar, hydro, some of the best in the whole world. But yet, parts of the continent have billions of people that don't have reliable sources of energy available to them, even though they have the resources to produce that. And the reason that's true is because of this problem, where you don't have anything to attract capital to come and build power plants there, the economy isn't big enough, it's sort of this chicken and egg problem to some extent. But if you had in embedded off taker and embedded user of the energy, then you can build a bigger plant than you need, have the computing absorb the excess energy, inject the power into the local economy. And as the local economy begins to grow and expand, you can then shrink the size of the computing and inject more power, and it just feeds on itself. Right? That concept, we hope will take hold, and really allow a rebalancing in terms of the amount of reliable, renewable and sustainable energy available to the world. And that's what excites us about what we do here.
Paul Zelizer 32:57
Fabulous business model and way you're partnering with creating Win Win solutions, Win Win win, right? It's a win for you, all, right? Because you're getting access to renewable energy, in a way that really allows you to provide things to your customers. And I want to ask you about that. I'm gonna put a pin there, how do you, how's your relationship to your customers, because we've mostly been talking about your suppliers thus far. So so you get to when you're the people that are the energy producers, the power plant companies, they're winning, because sometimes it's like, this isn't even a viable project without what Jonathan's team are doing. Right? So they're winning. And then the customer gets to use renewable energy and at times, like you're using the example in places and sometimes people are calling in less developed countries. LDCs is what some people here are, at in my United Nations in the sustainable development circles, that's oftentimes how so in an LDC, or in a rural area, a place where there isn't that infrastructure, either business or grid to move energy around, affordably and cheaply. So there's your there's a win for the, you know, person in a community that might not otherwise have access to energy or certainly not renewable energy, the renewable space gets to benefit because it's more viable. And you all are benefiting. Let's go talk about what this means for you all. Like how much does renewable factor into why they're excited to buy from you?
John Belizaire 34:37
So our business was designed really to be a two phase approach. Phase one is we focus on one form of computing, Bitcoin mining, and then allows us to deploy that capital build out the facilities use the revenue and profits from that facility to reinvest and build out more facilities and reach a certain footprint such We can credibly go to the enterprise. And when we go to the enterprise where we position is sustainable computing, computing power directly from Green electrons, low cost computing, because we're only focused on one type of computing, application battable forms, that allows us to build facilities that are less, less expensive, more distributed in nature. And we can deliver you almost the same tools that you would get from the other cloud providers. Okay, but just more fine tuned to these types of applications like scientific research, content, management and content transcoding, for example, university research, any kind of AI or machine learning training that you would be doing, a lot of that costs is becoming sort of overwhelming for some companies, and they're actually starting to insource it. And so sustainability of it is a big selling point for how we would position our data centers to the enterprise.
Paul Zelizer 36:09
So that's what this is phase one. And what's kind of on the ground right now? Where do you see Soluna? Going? Like, if you look ahead three years or five years, what do you imagine the company looking like that?
John Belizaire 36:23
Yeah, they're going to be large financial institutions, they're going to be big content houses, think of the Disney's of the world, big movie houses, they're going to be large universities with big research arms, there'll be big data companies that have huge data corpuses that they need to process. And they, they will deploy them into into our facilities, there'll be companies that are really ESG focused and want to drive more and more percentage of their compute footprint, to be green energy powered. This ethos is becoming a real important one, we've spent a lot of time talking to data scientists, and they tell us that, you know, they want to see more of their computing, green. And so it's very exciting to see the transition in people's minds. And I think that's going to really get people to listen to us, you know, once once we have the footprint, and the tools and the capabilities available to to, to deliver on that.
Paul Zelizer 37:31
So this space, you're in John, this space of technology and renewables and climate like this space is blowing up like it does. It's awesome. And, and I'm blessed to be a part of several circles, I recently just became a scout for enduring planet, which is working on getting capital in the hands of climate entrepreneurs and just joined a community called work on climate, almost 10,000 people on a slack channel and fabulous climate technology folks working to help. You know, here's resources and spread stories and people getting jobs. So so like when I say this space is blowing up, I'm seeing it from an informed place, right? I'm talking to you people are doing like, we have a lot of listeners who are newer on the end of this tech, we have some incredibly long standing decades old, but we also have the folks who are like the next generation of impact leaders and impact entrepreneurs, what would you say to somebody who's like, I want to do something in the renewable, sustainable space? And I'm not five years along, I don't have everything as polished as you have it, John, what kind of things have you learned, as a founder as CEO in this renewable energy and tech space that you could pass on to somebody who's a little earlier on in their journey?
John Belizaire 38:54
Yeah, I would say the following. The first is, don't let planning get in the way of doing in this is true in business and in life. You know, I think you should just get out there and join some of these communities. Get inside some of these companies that are a little old and stodgy and bring a little bit of innovation. Start with a small group of people just talking about the problem and learning about the problem. And then you can parlay that into an idea that becomes a business. And once you're in the space where you're forming and shaping that business, and be prepared for lots and lots of wins and lots and lots of losses. And those losses is very powerful. They're there. They're very powerful bits of information that helps you to learn where you're ultimately going to land as a bit So take us, for example, you know, we, we were firm believers that the only way to prove vertical integration is to start out by doing vertical integration. Well, that turned out to be really, really hard, really challenging. And when we decomposed it, and now we're growing at this fast rate, and we're going to all these different power plant owners, they're now taking us back to vertical integration, which is where we started in the first place. So you never really know where your journey is going to take you. The first and most important thing to do is to just start to start that run, start that, that jog, if you will, and, you know, at first you're gonna, you're gonna feel some, some, some pain and suffering as you build up the momentum. But before you know it, you'll be going so fast, the speed that you will be at will really be unstoppable, you'll reach the top of the hill, you know, barely, sort of making it there. And that's where your goal will be. And then you'll reset to the next to the next hill again, that's just the way entrepreneurship is, there's no real other way to do it. I like to describe it like a long run, you know, where you started out and you, you drive along that pace. And then eventually your body changes to meet the demands of the actual exercise that you're you're under. That's what happens with companies, they change, they reform, they reshape, and then eventually, they become this thing that you just didn't imagine. And it overnight just takes over the world. And that is the challenge and opportunity with entrepreneurship. And so what I would say to folks out there, they're even thinking about doing it, is to just start doing it.
Paul Zelizer 41:50
I'm an ultra marathoner. So you're talking my language. Just get put your sneakers on. And let's go right. Yeah, you just got to start going. Two miles, right. You don't you don't start with 100 mile run. You start with a one mile run,
John Belizaire 42:06
right? Yeah, he's way ahead of time. Exactly. One mile at a time. Yeah. It's great.
Paul Zelizer 42:12
And I would be neglectful if I didn't ask you about this. John, I, I joke. Sometimes I say, you know, my name is Paul, and I'm podcast obsessed. I love podcasting. And then when I was doing my research, getting ready, I was like, Oh, look at this, you all have a podcast, and you as the CEO are the host of the podcast. And we were just having this conversation in an impact group that I was a part of, when you have an organization that is excited about podcasting, you want to have your own branded podcast, you know, what are the benefits of having the CEO and there are some real ones. But sometimes the CEO is kind of a little busy, you've got a lot on your plate is really growing. Talk to us a little bit about that decision, like why podcasting? And also, why you as the CEO as the host of the podcast.
John Belizaire 43:03
Yeah, that's a great question. So our podcast is called Clean integration. It's actually the rebranded name, we actually started out being called the kingdom. And the original idea behind a podcast and this was a few years ago, when podcasting was was was barely sort of a glimpse, now, everybody's podcasting. It was a way for us to tell our story. And it was one of those things where we're in the room, and we're like, well, we want to introduce the world to what we're what we're talking about. And we want them to get to know the people involved, what our challenges are every day really provide a sort of transparent view into the company. And so what we found was that the cool thing about podcasting is you can just set up a mic, and just start a conversation like you would at the office, except it's being recorded. And you're, you know, you're you're, you're talking to the audience outside the company. And we started with a really great cadence. You know, we were sort of coming out once a week, once every other week, just sort of giving people a view, we talked about our culture, we talked about the challenges we were going through, we gave people a view into the project and what we were learning there and so forth. And we started to build a really great following. People were just jazzed about our story and really wanted to root us on. And over the last few years, what we realize is that our story is just part of many stories about the things that are happening in the space and are shaping this whole revolution, this whole transition. I like to say that everybody, you know, we're all at this point, if you're excited about climate change, but we're all in the back of a Tesla moving at high speeds into the future, you know, and I don't even think anybody's driving. We're all you know, we're all just like, you know, yeah, happening away about, you know how what direction we should go. And so we've evolved clean integration to really be a platform for inviting others, to talk about what they're doing so that we can learn from them, and they can learn from us. And that shift from just being about us to being more about the movement that is underway, is so much more fulfilling in terms of, you know, what we're doing, we talk about, you know, everything that's happening in the renewable energy space, crypto space, the grid regulation, and it's really become a powerful education tool for investors in the company for potential employees, I want to join us for members of the community that want to learn about these fascinating things, I learned so much. And the reason I enjoy doing it is because it's a powerful tool for me to stay connected to the industry, because, you know, the CEO role can get very, very lonely and almost myopic to some extent, you know, you're so focused on your own business that you miss all the innovation that's happening around you. And so I wanted to stay a very active part of that, be the host, and keep my lens focused outward, where, you know, out there out the front of the windshield, if you will, at the Tesla. So I can see how the world was shaping. As I was building the company,
Paul Zelizer 46:29
big Gowdy, I think it's a very wise decision. And I know that not every company who's thinking about a podcast is going to take that route. But I, for the exact reasons you just described, if it can be somebody in leadership, and somebody who has access to the steering wheel of that Tesla. Love that image, at least in your own company, I would hope that a CEO has some access to the steering wheel right? To be in conversation with the larger ecosystem. I think there's a lot of reasons to be thinking about that. So I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on why you made that choice. Dan, I could hang out with you all day, and you're really busy human are listeners are super busy, as a way to start to wind down if there was something you were hoping we would get to and we haven't touched on it yet about the awesome work that you're doing your company that's happening in this space. Or there's another tip or suggestion you want to leave for our impact founders as we wind down, what would that be? So
John Belizaire 47:35
I think the only thing we didn't we didn't touch on I do want to share with the community here is that we're really interested in growing our team and bringing the best minds to bear to do what we're doing, you know, get out there and make renewable, the number one power source on the planet. And so if there are folks out there, you know, on a treadmill right now working out, and you're thinking about what's the next thing I should do with my life that, you know, is really exciting, you should give us a call. If you're, you know, taking a walk right now and you're listening to my voice and your ears as you're, you know decompressing from your PhD thesis or something like that, in grad school, and you really want to get involved in climate change, you should definitely reach out to us because we feel that the mission that we're on is an important one. It's not sufficient to be innovative. But it's it's important to do things that are important. And we really feel that. You know, driving additionality and creating more renewables is an important mission. And we want to have people who care about that on board, or in the car with us, if you will. And so reach out to us, we'd love to hear from you.
Paul Zelizer 49:00
Awesome. And there'll be a link in the show notes to the Soluna website. As well as you all are really active on Twitter and LinkedIn, awesome podcast, you have a great blog, you have a blog post that talks about how you just raised $35 million to scale this word, go check it out lizard, all of that will be in the show notes. John, thank you so much for your time today and for the incredible work that you're doing.
John Belizaire 49:25
Thank you both for having me. I really appreciate the time.
Paul Zelizer 49:28
So that's all the time we have for today's show. Before we go a quick reminder, we love listener suggested topics and guests. If you have an idea, you can go to the AWARE printers website, go to our contact page. And we have three simple guidelines. We try to be really transparent about what we're looking for the kinds of stories we like to tell. If you look at those and say Check, check, check, send your ideas in. So for now, I just want to say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care in these intense times. And thank you For all the positive impact that you're working for in our world