Solar Service at Scale: John Berger on Pairing AI With People

0:00So, you want to save the world with clean energy? Make money doing it? Confused about the economic and technical realities of residential and commercial solar, batteries, heat pumps, EVs? Want the real-world scoop on new energy technologies not manufacture hype? Then tune in to the weekly energy show hosted by Barry Cinnamon. Insights from Barry's 40-plus years in the solar and energy industry will help you understand the future ways we'll generate and consume energy. And now here's Barry. Welcome to this week's energy show. Now when it comes to solar and batteries, there's absolutely no doubt that these technologies are the cheapest and most scalable way to generate and deliver energy, but their tremendous changes in the solar and battery industry, especially due to changes in incentives. A change is opportunity. And with millions of solar and battery systems on US rooftops and many original installers either out of business or just don't have time to answer the phone, there's a tremendous

1:02demand for service and maintenance. So, my guest on this week's show is John Berger. He's the founder and CEO of Atouvo Energy. And Atouvo provides power services for homes and businesses in both Europe and the US. In other words, they keep these power systems running. John's been in the renewable energy business for almost 20 years. He's an old timer. I mean, even though he doesn't look like it yet, he's getting a few gray hairs. But most recently, he's CEO of Sonova and standard renewable energy. He's got a great track record going back in technology and finance. So welcome to the show, John. Thanks for having me, Barry. It's good to see you again. It's been a while and a lot of transition. So we're both here and we're both super busy and that's a real testament to what we're doing. That's a little bit more about how you started Atouvo and what the expected evolution is. Yeah. So, actually, it started a company called On The. It was a Texas based company that did service behind the meter for generator solar, batteries,

2:03EV chargers, load managers, Rezzy and commercial. And then merged with Atouvo right away, though, which is a publicly traded company out of Norway, had operations in terms of origination of solar and battery systems in multiple countries in Europe, 40,000 plus install base. Yeah. So we were able to take that footprint, if you will, in operations. Stop doing the new build, solar and just focus on doing the service. And then we've acquired eight other companies now since then and we have another group that we're about to, well, we're in the process of announcing as per the earnings call. And we're going to keep going from there. So it's an international company now. We're in with Green Panel. We're in 17 countries and most states, or certainly the states that have the predominant

3:06amount of solar and battery installs in the US at that. So gotten fairly large fairly quickly. You just mentioned that 17 countries and God knows how many languages that works out. I used to run an international software company and it was just a nightmare getting everything localized. How is AI helping with the localization and the standardization? Yeah, it's pretty cool. I mean, you know, now you can instantly translate in any other language and I use that capability. I mean, countless times a day. And then the voice itself is definitely markedly improved and we're waiting on the latest models to be able to be approved. I mean, to be able to use in production. And that's going to change things to the point where real time you can speak when somebody doesn't understand your tongue, your language, then they will be able to understand that. I mean, it's really, really fascinating how things have changed in such a quick period

4:09of time. I honestly, I think learning languages will be something that it's kind of something maybe you'd want to use as a trick, so to speak, or just to show that you care enough to understand the language or you have that ability. But it's no longer, very quickly, it's no longer to be necessary to do business. Yeah, well, the universal translator in Star Trek and the ear bug that they had in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is absolutely a reality now. Yep. It's amazing. You mentioned a Tovo's International. How is a Tovo finance and what are your future plans there? We've been doing acquisition primarily with stock in the company and then also raised some cash for each acquisition. And of course, we have transaction costs, translation legal. And so we've been really just to equity funding everything. And so we don't have much debt really at all.

5:13And we're going to keep it that way. Yeah, that's really, really good, especially in these somewhat unturned times. Tovo's taking advantage of what's broken about the home energy system business, elaborate on what doesn't work right. Whether it's solar and batteries or HVAC or just any kind of household services. Yeah, there's keep a problem in our industry. And it flicks the generator industry in many ways worse, which is that the installation business having built both businesses, both in installation and service, I can tell you. We all pretty much know this. Installation business is very different than the service business. And you're either in the installation business or you have two separate companies. You do see this sometimes in the generator landscape. And frankly, it's the only way it works. I mean, trying to fit in, hey, I'm going to do some service work around these projects when I get to it. You can imagine that's not a really good customer experience.

6:15The generator guys that are doing only generator, which I predict will be fewer and fewer in the future in the sense that I think you need to do all the power assets. You know, they have preventive maintenance. And that helps because you can schedule by definition preventative maintenance, but that doesn't fix service. And so when something's wrong, you need a roll of truck and fix it. And that's just a materially different business. It's also our business is a lot more complicated with power. And they are more construction projects. You do need to pull permits. You're operating in the outside of the house. And I'll just say that all of us in the construction business knows that that does matter. If you're inside the house, does every permit get pulled? Well, let's think maybe, maybe, right? But in the outside of the house where the inspector, the municipalities driving by, yeah, you definitely should be doing that.

7:15So there's just a lot of major differences between the two. And then that's created this situation where there just really isn't service levels that the both residential and commercial customers really, you know, are happy with. And so what we're doing here is we're just focused on service. We'll, we'll form out the installs if we happen to get them like batteries and so forth. But just focusing on the service piece of this rather than the installation piece. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I just think back to the early 2000s when we were installing solar and there was basically no maintenance. And then when we started putting in batteries, you know, 10 years ago or so, it was babysitting. It wasn't really maintenance. It was just making sure the things keep working. But now we're seeing that there is an opportunity for kind of regular, maybe buy annual or semi-annual solar panel cleaning. But what's really jolted our service side of our business and you're absolutely right. It's two separate, two separate crews is the HVAC business where we're able to schedule filter changes and annual cleaning and, you know, the lux cleaning and things like that.

8:20And it's, it ends up being quite profitable. Once you have people on a regular payment schedule and, you know, they're willing to do that, you keep the systems running. HVAC is like, I need my house warm or I need a cool and batteries aren't so important. But there's tremendous opportunity and I'm kind of, we're looking forward to building our business on a service side because it's more of a recurring, predictable revenue stream. Yeah, and it's a logistics business at the end of the day, right? So, you know, how do you get to multiple places for small tickets versus the construction side is, how do I get there and I've got a large ticket and, you know, how do I do as much work and you do a lot of work before you get to that side, right? So it's a very different, again, very different businesses even though you can have some commonality in terms of labor and managers. But, you know, the other thing is, you know, how do you, how do you start to deploy AI and technology in the business? You're going to have a lot more changes in the service business than you are in the installation

9:24business with AI. It doesn't mean the installation business won't be impacted by AI. Every business will be, but the service business in particular because it does involve more logistics, humans, back office where you've just got a lot more staffing. You're going to have to do to route that man and that, you know, that technician and that truck to get to that house versus, hey, we got a big project. Let's go get a couple of trucks with some guys. Let's go put, you know, put these on. It's just, the economics are different. The operations are different and the impact that you're going to see with AI is going to be different. We have examples that we've been going through for the last few months. You know, we obviously use QuickBooks for payroll. We use SAMSARA to kind of keep track of where our trucks are. We have automated scheduling with Housecloth Pro and looking at service tighten. But now we're able to integrate all those things together. And we can check with SAMSARA exactly where the employees are and why they're not in the place they have to be to do the service work and if they're scheduled in one place

10:26while they're not spending too much time, you know, getting lunch. And AI enables us to make those connections and track it and report it and address it really, really expediently in a way that no individual's House program could have ever done. That's absolutely right. And everything is like it services a scale business. You can have a smaller installation business and most installation businesses are small. And this, you know, frankly, over the years that the industry we've seen where the installation business gets too big and the, you know, the mortality rate is pretty high. But in service, it scales everything because the tickets are so small and, you know, it's spending a lot of money on software and the service business is really expensive. Again, more so. So it's, I think what we're doing right now, we're doing thousands of tickets, you know, work orders per month now and climbing very quickly and globally.

11:28And having that global footprint is enabling us to get even more business because you got the large manufacturers that need, you know, and want to have one, you know, so-called throughout the choke and one company to go to and just say, hey, you're going to solve the problems and negotiate. And they negotiate on a scale basis as well. So it's a scale, big scale game that's very fragmented on the service side and the installation game. It's still, I think, much more to do about with the local approach. I call it Cinnamon's luck because we expanded to be the largest residential installer about 15 years ago. And it just absolutely killed us handling all those jurisdictions because all the rules were different. But for services, it's the same. So no doubt in my mind that the installation business, whether it's solar or HVAC or batteries, it's going to be localized dominated by those local companies. But when you come to service programs, the big investment is in the kind of the back

12:29office technology and you can spread that over, you know, any jurisdiction you want. It doesn't really matter. So that's, that's terrific. Well, talking about that, what specific services in geographic areas does Tovo currently cover? We have a revenue membership, which is basically monitoring and being there for within 48 hours, 12 or sorry, 48, 24, 12 hours notice. And then we have repairs. We have battery upgrade sales, but also think like, you know, critical arts, things like that, batteries. And then we have retail power and BPP and Texas. And we want to expand that. Those are five revenue streams. We have, I think 20 states now are 19 somewhere in there in the US and again, 17 countries, a lot of countries in Europe. And then Israel and the Middle East. So you know, that gives us a very large footprint and we would, we now have well over 2 million

13:34contacts, numbers of installations. So you know, the contact information, the equipment type and so forth. And we do monitor a chunk of those as well. We're always trying to get more monitoring because that helps us serve the customer better. And the commercial business is also, you know, it, that's a booming business for us as well because there's a lot of things that have gone wrong with the commercial systems across the US and Europe, Israel. And it's, it's, it, it continues to become more where there's more, more commercial adoption. I think in the US, it's kind of clear why, you know, with government policy been restricted now to the commercial owner in terms of the investment tax credit. But also, you know, I'd say that, you know, as the power bills grow, you know, these bills and the commercial, you know, they can get quite large. And so having these systems down, it's in, in, in many of these cases, they have multiple

14:40inverters or multiple batteries and they're just big, you know, much, you know, multiple systems even in, in, in top of bigger systems. And that's just more dollars. So it makes more sense to go out there, roll a truck, get something fixed and the payback is, is much faster than, than even on a large home. And companies want to outsource that because they're existing facilities people, they have near the time or the skill to kind of watch some kind of internal monitoring that might be a little perplexing. So yeah, have that done professionally and notified, then you can roll a truck. That's it. I really like that model. So in terms of the service business, there's companies that have been providing solar services for a while. I see them kind of come and go. But how has AI changed the game when it comes to providing these services in a way that you can make a profit and it's not, you know, outrageously expensive for the customer of the manufacturer? Yeah. So first, we, we, we built our own tech stack. So instead of using Salesforce HubSpot, but even on the call center side, air call, talk

15:41desk, all that, we stripped out all the sass. We use ramp, we use Stripe and, and we use something on the accounting side just to get that regulatory stamp being a public company. But quite candidly, we could develop our own accounting system really good. I mean, that's not a bold claim at all at this point for what I see what we've done. And why is that important? Well, as we get bigger and bigger, you know, those, those all those sass software that those, those pennies add up, you know, it's a per seat cost, but it's also just upfront cost and then development cost to get it to where you want it. And then let's be, let's be clear about it. Because we all know you never get it to where you want it. And there's just some configuration that they're not going to let you do because they're trying to serve, you know, everybody in the global economy for the, you know, for the most part. And so what we've been able to do is tailor something to our needs and then be able to, you know, really have it efficient in running both on compute power, but also on token usage.

16:47And so we've collapsed our, our cost. I mean, if I had this when I was at Sonova, we would have been saving, no joke. We would have been saving, you know, $15 million a year. It's that meaningful. And then on top of that, then we're getting into agents. So you're seeing, you know, we're okay. So be specific, John customer care over 50% of our customer care in the United States is being handled by and growing rapidly is being handled by endurance in Europe. It's over 90%. And it goes into some of the multiple languages and so forth that we talked about that capability. And if you look at scheduling and dispatch, that's now being done 100% by endurance. If you look at marketing, a lot of that is being done. We still have staffing there, but we would need, I would estimate at least 50% more staffing than what we have.

17:49Sales, depending on the day, Iris, which is the sales agent for endurance, she is either number one or number three globally and sales. And it's really intensified in terms of made our people better because they're trying to compete with her. And so that's an added benefit I didn't see. And there's something that are really good that they are beating her. And then you've got things that help the technicians like, hey, I don't know exactly how to handle this inverter well. We can do that through our endurance system. We're also teaching the model as we become bigger as a company and we're essentially assimilating other companies. We're taking best practices and that's training multiple models across the company. So financial analysis, I mean, there really isn't any part of the company.

18:51I don't have an executive assistant or a chief of staff for the first time in 20 years, even building companies. I'm not going to. I simply have my agents and one in particular that I use quite a bit. So you're just looking across the board and it's like cut, cut, cut, I mean, all these expenses cut and you're not going to be competitive unless you have this AI capability and really leaned into it. And it's really difficult. The more that I've gone through, the more I've realized running a big company, this is really tough to say, here's what AI. And by the way, there's a definition of AI that everybody else has that's different maybe. And what I mean by that is there's no one definition of AI. Oh, I use AI. That could mean that you just use chat, even in the bottom end, that's AI. So that can be using AI.

19:51Then there's developing the software, developing agents, deploying the agents, then making sure your organization is reconfigured for agents and humans. There's a varying degrees. And when we say we use AI, we use, we're on the cutting, cutting edge of it. That's materially different. And you're seeing a lot of companies really struggle with especially big companies for I think obvious reasons. How do I restructure my entire company and all the processes and all the functions and the human employees and truly take the benefit of AI as it's rapidly changing? That's incredibly difficult. We're going through the same thing that we've got to, you know, separate or major packages that we're using to run the business. And now we're, you know, all the executive and the sub executives. They're starting to use, you know, clawed or chatchy between, really digging into streamlining what they're doing and putting together dashboards that's a mishmash of a different bunch of different programs and making correlations which are really useful.

20:55And that's working. But we haven't been able to shed any of those SaaS programs yet. So our expenses haven't gone down. Although the back office, you know, the office productivity's improved. What we're working on now is finding ways to increase the top line revenue because that's you know, that's something there's a direct bottom line improvement. Whereas if you just make the executives work a lot more efficiently and they love to work more efficiently, hopefully they can do more. It doesn't bring top line revenue and immediately. So what advice do you have for solar companies and battery companies and home services companies to start to use AI and then really achieve the benefits of AI without spending all the money on the existing platforms. And now suddenly you're writing these huge monthly checks for tokens. Well, my first advice would be is that you may be better off. You're most likely to be better off joining up with a bigger company. And sell in your company. And so if you're an HVAC service company or something just to do that, just to get the scale

21:57and that scale gives you access to the talent that can go develop the AI. And really about really developing your tech stack and developing your agents. That's probably maybe advice that many of us don't want to hear. I got fortunate and lucky in the sense of getting access into that talent. I'm just recognizing realities and that's what I hear from a lot of the companies that we merge with is I don't know who to call. I don't even know how I manage that. So you figured it out clearly. So one of them I just come join and that's going to be a lot better for me. And then I can focus on operations. I love doing that and so forth or sales or whatever the case may be. So that's been very successful. So I'd say that's my first answer. The second answer is that over time you're going to have these groups. You're going to start seeing maybe even some of us have started to see it.

22:59Where if you remember back in the internet days when you had all these consulting shops pop up. So I've got quite large, some went public. And of course the big consulting firms, the McKenzie, the Bains, they were going crazy with, you know, how do you go out strategy and take advantage of e-commerce and all that other stuff that was really new. And you're going to see that in a big way. But it's going to be much bigger than the internet. And the reason is what I was just mentioning is you really got to restructure your entire company. And I would say that I guess if you look at Clayton, Christianson and innovators to Atlanta, you would say that the incumbents are in really bad shape in this regard because restructuring is, it takes a lot to go in that boardroom and go, hey, I want to just rip apart everything that we have. What do you all think about that? And yet that's the right thing to do. But you can imagine, I just don't see a whole lot of CEOs that are going to end up doing

24:01that. They're going to have to see a reason, like a real competitive threat. How can he charge that? That's crazy. He must be going, you know, losing money and then for them to realize, no, the cost structures that much lower, you need to figure out, you know, how you're going to compete. That's going to take a while for that whole cycle to happen. In the meantime, you're going to have a lot of people out there trying to say, hey, I can help you. And I think the challenge there is, you know, finding the right company to do that and then coming up with a price that actually makes sense where you don't spend that so much money that you lost the benefit at the end of the day as a small company. And that's where I go back to my first answer is that's probably the best answer there or at least in the near term. AI is such a moving target. You've got, you know, if you were going to restructure your company, you've got a business, you've got all these applications, you know, 12 to 18 months to really redesign it the right way. But then you're looking at like three to six month technology cycles with the AI capabilities

25:05and so whatever you do, you got to do it really fast and make sure you're using a platform that's going to be extensible. But I agree, very, very risky to dive into that with all the expenses that are involved in order to do it quickly. And I'm kind of happy that I'm running a business right now where I've got a lot of people and they're like, I've got a lot of trucks, I've got a lot of installations, I've got a lot of service and AI is not going to take that away. I just want to be able to deploy it in a much more effective, profitable manner. Yeah. I think an interesting question is that I've been thinking about is, you know, you've got a lot of these, you know, the second hottest area and private equity is rolling up home services in particular HBAC companies and so forth. And you got a mixture of install install and service and some in HBAC. And I've been able to decipher why that's different than the behind the meter power industry. It's a lot fewer skews. There's just a lot of less going on. And yes, and that's inside, as I mentioned earlier, versus outside, there's some material

26:05per difference there with permanent polling and so forth. But you know, it's interesting. Are the big HBAC roll ups going to be able to truly adopt, basically do it we've done at HBAC. Are they going to be able to do it or not? That's an, I'm not answering the question either way. I simply, I really don't know. But I think it would be really interesting to see if they can or can't, you know, do it. I get so many more requests because we have a small HBAC company and a big solar and battery company and not that big, but you know, the dominantly solar and batteries. But the HBAC is growing much faster. I'm getting like three times more private equity inquiries every single day for an HBAC roll up. I can't even remember the last time I got somebody say, hey, we want to buy your solar and battery business. Even though it's doing okay. And then when I start to look at the questions that the roll up company is one, it's like, do you use service tighten? That's the main platform. That's what we're rolling up around. I'm like, I think you're rolling up around last year's technology and not next year's

27:08technology and making that investment in something that is that constrained that's not really oriented towards the future, which I believe to be electrification, not necessarily HBAC or batteries. That's taking it down the wrong path. It's not going to win. No, it's not. Look, there's this whole SASO apocalypse or whatever you want to call it, the argument that's going on. And look, I would say that the first and foremost, and really think about this, a lot of people say, well, the technology is not there yet or the technology's got to catch up, whatever it may be. In this case, that's not true. The humans have to catch up. I mean, they're still, I'll say, as of this recording, we haven't seen the Astra model drop from OpenAI. We haven't seen, you know, with Anthropic, their latest model as well.

28:09And that's because they're very powerful and they're having to go through a much more, you know, a lot bigger scrutiny internally to those companies, but also with the White House and the US government. Can you imagine what the capabilities are? We actually know, we have a glimpse of it. That's just what it would be a glimpse. But a guy like Elon Musk has a full view of that. He made that point clear on an interview with the economist a couple of few weeks ago. And it's enormous change from where we sit today. And yet we still haven't maximized the model capability across the enterprise of where we sit today. And it's because we cannot keep the humans interfacing with the models constantly. And you hear a lot about this, the zombie, you know, AI workers, but they are worth $50, $100, you know, plus million dollars in your neck of the woods, right?

29:11And that's real. That I can see it. I personally deal with it in the sense that I want to keep going, keep going because you see the productivity and what you can do. But you have to eat. You have to sleep. You have to have a life and so forth. So it's a real challenge. And at the same time, you come back and go, and yet this is how hard we're running. And this is my point and we're still not maximizing the model today. And there's a new one coming. And there's another one that's behind it. Oh my gosh. Like here's, you know, how am I ever going to catch up here? So I find it interesting. And most people are like, well, the technology isn't caught up. And I'm like, no, actually you haven't caught up. We haven't caught up as humans. And that gap is increasing. Yeah, we're not catching up. No, because that's accelerating much faster. We're just kind of plotting along. So that's a big transition that we're all going to have to start to absorb. You mentioned something about VPPs in Texas. And how does that fit into your model? Because I'm very excited.

30:12First of all, I think some of these VPP deals are crazy. But I'm also very excited about how it really can be a very, very big contributor to solving the data center energy crisis and just finding ways to increase the capacity of the grid. So how is a Tovo involved with that? We are basically wrapping retail power in the dereg markets around the assets and selling to customers as part of our service. And then with that, we're selling essentially a VPP service with that. So you're basically taking the short and the length of the grid power and matching them up and selling them up to a power trading company. You could manage the risk yourself. I obviously did that in first part of my career in terms of power trading. But right now, we're sub-scale. That doesn't make any sense for us to be able to carry that overhead and frankly, our balance sheet to carry that kind of risk. So we're not going to do that. But I view it as a way of two things.

31:13One, making ourselves more valuable to our customer, which is first and foremost, and most important second is that if somebody is going to buy this just like a big power plant, just like it used to do, what do they want? They want to make sure that thing is running. When they need it, it's running. I've been in the situation where you need that power and that plant. It don't work. That's a really bad situation for you as the power trading company. So I think it's a natural fit on the service side. You think about it, installation, you built this thing and it's done. From a power trading standpoint, I don't really... That happened years ago or whatever. That's not really necessary for me to figure out how to maximize my position that I purchased by paying money to the customer and so forth with a VPP. But I do care about how often and how much power is produced over a period of years or determine the contract that I have with the VPP.

32:15Some of the statistics from historical VPP power systems are some manufacturers and equipment and installers. They're 98% reliable, some are 95%. Some are 66% and some don't even qualify. It's just amazing that there's that much variability. I think to a large degree, it's equipment, but it's also just making sure that you're doing the ongoing monitoring and maintenance to make sure that when you need it, it's going to be there. You can pretty much tell if you're doing the monitoring if it's going to turn on when you need it. That's right. Let's talk about what your advice is. Somebody that's been in the solar business for so long. What recommendations do you have for homeowners who are looking to install solar batteries or electrification equipment like HVAC and EV chargers? Well, I mean, the landscape is still very uncertain, particularly in the finance and marketing area as we speak. I'd like to say that gets solved in the near future, but I don't think so.

33:15I think that the uncertainty caused by the political dysfunction of the country, particularly the most unfortunate that it's been in terms of energy, been heavily politicized, not just politicized, heavily politicized. I think somewhere this stabilizes, but in the meantime, it's a treacherous industry to navigate. I would say, though, as a consumer, I would try to get where I can now, because you never know when the situation even gets worse. I mean, look at anybody that put in solar and batteries of the last two, three years. I would say, given the tariff impact and everything else, even before that, and before the ITC, Tate jerked away from homeowners, for instance, that you had been better off getting some of the systems. I think the idea about waiting for the technology to get better. I heard that countless times.

34:15We've all heard that. That's actually in hindsight not been a great idea. It's not worked out. Power rates have gone up. You put in a system even 10 years ago. I would bet you're probably better off than even now. I wouldn't wait. I'd go out and do it. I don't think that the power prices are going to collapse anytime soon or anything else of that nature. I would look at how do I get a great installer? You can do the research and everything else and do that. You probably got to be better off doing a lease, although the financing market is pretty stressed. I'm not sure it's really that big of a discount, but I'd go do the analysis on that. That's the same as you're buying anything. Is it better off to lease it versus with the tax credit and bet it into it versus owning it when you don't have a tax credit now? I think that part hasn't changed from the consumer angle.

35:16Then I would demand a like, okay, who is going to take care of this? Don't go with an install-only company. It's at the end of the day in Sonova. Sonova is our rounds. There's a company that took on all those customers. They have an obligation to take care of them. Even the loans because we did sell service with the loans and nobody else did. Even the loans, whether that is the service you want and that works out, I have no idea. I'm not involved in that. That did get handled, but a lot of the big installers, and I'm not going to name names. We all know it, but that went under. There is no service obligation that's being taken on. Take it out. You're just out of luck. You're better off going in and figuring out, okay, as I do my financial analysis, I got to pay somebody to do this because I guess at the end of the day it comes down to this.

36:21It's too good to be true, probably, as they say. Saying that you get free maintenance for 20 years, 25 years, or whatever, that was always good to be true and that certainly has been the case. Factor in the cost of service in your financial analysis of what makes sense for you and your family or not. When I look back over 25 years, every single customer I could ever remember has been happy saying I put in a bigger system than I thought I needed. Nobody has ever said it would have been better to wait. As they say, all this money along the way, equipment costs have come down in installation up a little bit, but then that comes down. The incentives have been good. There's no doubt in anybody's mind that's got a grip of reality that electricity prices aren't going to continue to go up. What we live what we talk about is we try and do quality work for customers. In my advice, whether they go with us or not, make sure you find an installer that's been through the ups and downs and they're going to make sure they're putting in quality equipment. They'll be able to either support you or find somebody that can help support you.

37:25You really do need that dedicated service team because your installer is just, they can't do it. It's just not the right thing for them. Totally great. It's just like, I'm a much older timer than you, but we've been through the same ups and downs and the advice hasn't really changed. It is the same. Some things don't change that even in this world. Is there anything else you want to talk about? I think that over time, I'd like to see the power industry become more about consumer choice and providing more opportunity there. I am disappointed that we haven't had that push more even though, interestingly, first in the oil business with the Permian, with not being able to get the power when they wanted to electrify the well head. They went and got power on-site instead of with the utility and created service companies,

38:26Solaris, etc. Then the data center guys came back and they couldn't get the power out of the utilities and that's a whole raging debate right now. Those same service companies have gone over to the data center side. I think you just keep drawing a line up and going, hey, you see a trend here, anybody? These are not going to solve this problem. I find it fascinating that we're debating intently about how to regulate or do we regulate AI and what does that mean? You're regulating the LLMs and so forth and how do you do that? It's interesting to me as saying, look, you're worried about LLMs coming into the government and trying to essentially erect barriers to them so that they can protect their business by essentially keeping everybody else out, like open weight models and so forth. Why aren't you focused on the power industry where that's absolutely happened?

39:30I'll say, if you think that you're still scratching your head as a homeowner or as a participant in this business going, I still can't understand why the individual American taxpayer that owns a home can't get an investment tax credit but a behemoth monopoly can. I don't understand how that happened. Just follow the money, my friend. That's exactly exactly what I'm saying. I posted on a link thing about that today. Somebody was saying, I don't understand why my electric rates keep coming up. All kinds of excuses are like, no, just follow the money. The higher electric rates are more profitable and they're contributing politically to make sure that they are able to achieve those profits and those goals. Look at the debate happening right now with socialism and so forth. Look at New York City with grocery stores and that never has worked. Yet in the power industry, we even have on the fellow capitalists and so forth on the

40:30whatever the right side of the aisle is these days. They still think it's in most parts okay that the power industry is a monopoly is run by the government effectively and I just don't understand that. It just doesn't make any sense and it's never worked anywhere else. We're going to continue to see power rates move up. We've burned off all of the excess capacity that we built up in the 90s. We've burned off all the transmission and distribution excess capacity. We've built up in the 70s and 80s and so we don't have anything else except to go out and pay a lot more for this infrastructure if you can even build it. If you're a monopoly, are you really that incentivized to push to go out and build a bunch of assets? We're just going to do enough and get what you can and increase the rates a little bit because if you're really worried about what it's going to take in terms of serving power

41:31demand with electrification and transportation, AI, etc. Then you'd be building a lot more and you're just not because the last thing you want to do is the utility CEOs go in there and say, hey, I really want to jack rates way up and this is all the building stuff that I'm going to go out there and do. You're right, I'm going to make more money on this but the rates will eventually come down and so forth. That just is not a good political argument and that's what you're running as a political animal as a utility. At the end of the day, I don't see how this is going to work and it isn't working and that's why you're seeing the data centers go into the behind-the-pins generation. I wonder at some point in time, do we have the right political leadership to stand up and go, you know what, we need to give the power, pardon the pun, back to the individual in this country and really solve this problem. I think we'll see solar batteries and a bunch of other technologies just completely take off as you take off the weighting of the government and I think there's an industry and therefore

42:34the economy will be far better off but still waiting for that to happen. Yeah, no doubt in our minds that solar and batteries and that technology is going to really be the more cost-effective way for consumers but we've got that barrier. The one big change that I've been watching happening in an accelerated rate is the effect that the data center built out is happening having on all of our political discussions. It's become the number one issue in the upcoming elections. I was at a Santa's community meeting on data centers last week. I was amazed at how angry everybody was about data centers. For every reason under the sun except, you know, but nobody had any good solutions. So I think that is going to spur some changes. It might take a few years. It might take until 2030. But I think we're on a path to changing it because of that demand for data centers. Yeah, I would say this. You know, the vast majority of Americans don't even know what a data center really is. And when you really press them or you know, hey, do you know what that is? They know. It's just so much these days like is the foreign governments trying to,

43:39you know, essentially create disinformation or create different disinformation for us to hate data centers so that they can get ahead. Absolutely. That is exactly what's happening. We've seen that over and over again about how that can happen. And when you press people, they don't really know why. They blame data centers for creating higher power prices. Okay, but what about the utility? They didn't build any generation. You know, what could they do more efficiently? Have you ever seen a utility be that efficient? I mean, you haven't. So it's interesting about, you know, what, who's getting blamed and what's happening in the political discourse. And I hope that we don't hamstring ourselves so that we're not moving ahead as a country for the first time. It really ever, even since prior to the founding of the country. So I hope we don't do that. And I hope we can continuously lean into technology and find ways

44:39to actually create a better life for ourselves and our children. Yeah. Well, John, you and I know the solutions. We've been pushing for a long time. That solar battery technology is going to prevail just because it's cheap and it's getting cheaper. So I'm really confident even though I know there's still going to be a lot of bumps to the road. Nevertheless, that's all the time we have on this week's Energy Show. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. And if you missed any today's show, you can always go to our website at EnergyShow.biz and listen to the podcast. Thanks for tuning in to this week's Energy Show.