A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

On average, we see about 30% of wasted energy in small businesses, small and medium. What we make, that is, you know, aging equipment, not the most efficient equipment being placed. The way they monitor and run it is not as efficient, and so on average, we expect that we can reduce it by up to it 30% which is a big deal, because if we can multiply that by the amount of small and medium businesses around the country, that is a bunch of Pico classes that don’t have to be built. That’s kind of like the gable play.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got a great guest on the program, Ibhade Eigbobo. I may have mispronounced your last name a little bit, and appreciate you correcting me. Iwade is the director of corporate project management at Budderfly, and welcome to the show.

Yeah, thank you. I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

So, tell us a little bit about how you came to the environmental space, and what your journey has been like. You know, to get here,

I don’t know how far you want me to go straight from Nigeria to college, but I was interested in engineering from a young age. I grew up in Nigeria, with my. I had a visit to NASA with my parents, my dad was really into space travel, that kind of really got me the bug of getting into engineering. I really wanted to build rockets, and then as I did my master’s in engineering, I got into the oil and gas business from University of Texas at Austin, which is in the area, you know, most of Texas is oil and gas.

The first thing is, so now I’m on that side of the business where I’m seeing how oil can be very detrimental to the environment, even though it’s one of the most useful, I think, raw materials out there. I kind of like, start thinking, like, how do I become a part of a solution that really, really pushes the envelope, so I then went to business school at Harvard, and used the opportunity to work with very various VCs, worked at Nextera for it there, just to learn more about the other side of energy that could be clean, and that’s how I got into it.

So, tell us about your current role at Budderfly, what Budderfly does, and what you do as the director of corporate project management.

Yeah, so I’ll start with what Budderfly does. So, let’s look at the ecosystem of where we are in energy in general. There’s obviously different sectors of businesses, stroke either residential, a small business, big business. How do they manage their infrastructure? A lot of customers, or a lot of companies, serve residential. A lot of customers also, sorry, clients serve the high end, so like industrials, very massive corporations, but very few kind of serve the medium stroke small customers, which is the CNI business.

This is where Budderfly came in. So, the CEO of Budderfly, he came up with a model where those small CNI businesses don’t have to worry about infrastructure. We become the energy as a service platform for them. So, we come in and we take over their whole energy efficiency sweep. How that works is, if I like to use a particular example to explain the model, and then I can explain what I do. A good example is, if you own a Chick-fil-A or a McDonald’s, and you pay $100,000 a year in electricity, what we will do as butterflies, we will take over the electricity and sit between you and the utility, and you now pay us your bill of what we, we baseline you at that 100k consumption, and we do everything in within our capital power to reduce it to the best of our ability. Most of the time, we get about 30% savings, so we pay the utility that’s 70,000 you pay us 100 grand, we just keep the margin.

The beauty of that model is that you know as a small business, you don’t have to look into your balance sheet to get capex to go buy a new HVAC or buy new LEDs. We take care of all that, we manage the installation, the maintenance, and also we also take on all the risk, because right now all you have to do is pay what you always pay in your electric bill. If those things don’t work as well, like they don’t save as much, we are taking all the risks, because that’s our margin, that’s the beauty. So we’re de-risking everything for the customer, that’s why butterflies grow. My role is to do the non-cost solutions, so I look into the modeling of non-cost, for example, solar battery, because our core solutions include HVACs, LEDs, refrigeration controls, monetary systems. I’m in charge of all the interest and stuff.

Tell us, how those no non-cost solutions work.

We come in, and right now you sign a lease, you sign an EMO control, we call it energy management outsourcing contract, and once you sign with us, all we all you’re doing now is giving us the opportunity to go take over your bill from the utility, so we’re just sitting between you, and so once you pay your bill, we are now responsible to get that, get those installed, get whatever we feel deemed best to install at your site to make sure the energy is utilized the right way.

The best way to explain it is, you don’t even have to think about it from the project management standpoint, from the installation standpoint, you don’t even have to think about it from, you know, how do I think about, is this the best HVAC we’re going to do, the best HVAC, because we know the most efficient gets us the most margin for both parties, and this is a 10 year contract, so while maintaining the equipment straw, so that’s what we mean by no cost, no capex for the customer.

So say in terms of the non-cost solutions, or though you said something about solar that’s not a cost to your client, but it’s obviously a cost to you all solar.

That’s correct.

And then what then what solar generally would have a longer time horizon than 10 years. How do you guys work with that?

That’s great question. We will automate it over the lifespan of what we of the contract, so typically if it’s a solar site, we will sign a longer term, maybe 15 years contract, or we will on our, or we will sign the 10 year contract, and at the end of the 10 years we have like a negotiated buyout fee for those who want to, or they can just renew. If they just renew them, we just keep it within the same profile. I will reaching the point where we’re seeing more renewals, because it’s just easier to keep just paying your electric bill while we keep managing it.

Now, what about the risk to your firm in terms of rising utility costs, which are seeming to affect a lot of places around the country? What’s the risk factor to you, and how have you guys been able to mitigate that?

A big, a big example is, if you look at what the energy bill is, this is a simple equation of consumption times rates, and what we do is we fix your consumption, but we pass through the rates, meaning if the rates do rise, we are both just seeing those rates right, but we also have a potential solution, which I’m guessing we’re going to talk about, is if we can start working into working batteries and figuring out how we can manage the rates, but for now we are passing through the rate increase from our bill to them, but with the increase, or when we decrease the consumption enough, the rate increase does not affect their bill a lot. If that makes sense, it doesn’t make it rise as high compared to if they were doing the capex plus managing all the consumption itself.

So, essentially, are you going in there and, and reducing consumption by putting in efficiency measures to reduce, you know, usage.

That’s correct. We are, we exactly, we’re installing as, as many equipment as and components as possible to reduce the consumption. So, what, what’s a target of reduced consumption on for small business owners across, you know, the US, and I guess the world at large, on average, we see about 30% of wasted energy in small businesses, small and medium. What we said is, you know, aging equipment not the most efficient equipment being placed. The way they monitor and run it is not as efficient, and so on average we expect that we can reduce it by up to it 30% which is a, which is a big deal, because we can multiply that by the amount of small and medium businesses around the country, that is a bunch of peak plots that don’t have to be built, you know, I mean, that’s that’s kind of like the gate we’re playing.

How much, you know, in terms of aggregate usage, do these small to medium sized businesses use of the total kind of electrical consumption of the country, in the country?

So, I’m not the exact number, it varies all the time, so I’m not exactly sure on the total number, but I will say small and medium businesses, from what we saw, was about it’s probably about 40 to 50% Residential is a good amount, and the massive industrials covered the other amount.

Okay, so we’re talking about a very big chunk of the potential power being, or the actual power. Are being used by by industry small business owners, so in terms of, you know, where, where you’re at currently in that process, it seems as though your company has grown quite a bit over over time, and have, I think, raised over a billion dollars to date, so obviously investors like the model. Where, where do you see it growing over the next five to 10 years?

Yeah, so what we’ve done right now is set phase one, and this is where I’m glad you asked this question. Phase one or three, we have three phases. We’re trying to go into first step is make sure we make you know each business is using energy to the most efficient as possible, that is the entry points. So, if you are using 100 kilowatt hours per day, and you could be using just 70 kilowatt hours a day, we will do that without capex. The next phase is where we’re getting into where is if we can attach battery stroke renewables at certain sites.

Now that we’ve reduced it, you don’t need to buy as big of a battery to be at those sites, so we can start dispatching power the right way and helping the grid in certain areas where capacity can be constrained, then the third phase will now be, how do we dispatch this? Do we want to now get into the business of helping data centers dispatch or helping EV charging, for example? That’ll be the third phase, but right now weighing the precipice of the second phase of figuring out how to attach battery storage at our sites.

So, are you looking into creating micro grids in areas that you’re servicing your customers?

Yeah, as much of that as possible. The best way to explain it is, the if you look at when you go into a site, you know, the low profile of certain sites, especially restaurants, is very high demand during peak hours of when everybody’s out looking for lunch hour, or you know, done from work, but there’s a lot of time, there’s a lot of law right towards night, maybe from 2am to 4am 5am and we want to be able to basically flatten that curve, because we believe that if we can flatten that curve, we will, we have a lot of opportunities to really help the ISOs and the utility manage not only manage like what their capacity or their cap tags are at certain peaks, but also reduce the dependence on having to have pico plants turn on because of the high demand, that’s that’s what we are.

You’re speaking about dispatch. What can you describe that a bit more for us? I’m not as familiar with that chart.

Oh God, sorry. So typically a battery, when we attach it to a site, it can either charge up, because the battery is not a, how I say it’s not an energy producer, it’s a buffer, is like a bucket for energy, you put in energy either through the grid or through renewable sources, and you, what I call dispatch is discharging, like it’s not releasing it, I’m being used, and so the best way to put it is that we want to be able to put the battery there, so that it will serve as a buffer for where there’s high peak demands, especially it will be dispatching or discharging its contents, and then recharging when there’s low demand, so like at night, right?

So, as battery technology gotten to the point where it is efficient to buy batteries to store this energy, and do small businesses – is it gotten to the point where it makes sense for them to have batteries outside?

I would say yes, because we’ll get into it more, but I guess I can use it now. There’s an expected increase in demand on electricity, electricity demand over the next five years due to data centers, AI from AI crypto. We’re expecting increase in large industrial loads to come in, because I think manufacturing is about to start coming into the US as well. We’re also expecting a big increase from electric vehicle charging, which a lot of these DC fast chargers are dispatching at 120 kilowatts, sometimes 250 kilowatts per session.

That’s a lot, and also migration to certain areas in the country. Some people are moving from the west to the east, some people are moving to the south, so certain areas are going to have high risk of grid constraint process entry grid failures, and you want to be protected from that, so that’s why we’re moving from this centralized model, and we believe that a distributed energy resource at your site will help protect you from that constraint that we expect to see in the next five years,

So we see in California. That approximately 25% of new cars are electric vehicles, and I think some other states are pretty close to that, Colorado, Washington. What are we looking at in terms of electrical usage in those areas? If we get up to 50, 75% even 100% are we going to have enough electrical generation to power all those vehicles?

I love that you asked that question. Right now, I will say so. To answers to that question, we have a value in terms of like whatever we need to produce energy, we have it and it exists. The technology exists. Do we have enough connected, potentially the constraint we’re seeing is in the transmission, because it has to pass through the same pipes, what I call pipes wires, to get to you, and those pipes are they were designed for a certain capacity, and the question you’re asking is a great question.

Because I don’t believe it’s those transmission pipes are sized for the future coming, and this is why we think certain areas need their own resources, like their own solar, their own batteries. Maybe, if you want your own fuel cell, a lot of data centers actually, if you notice, they have, whenever they’re getting commissioned or being designed, they’re being designed to have some great as backup, but they will also have, like, their solar fuel cells from battery on site, because they even – they even know the more that it comes up, the more it’s going to constrain them, and they can start having certain brownouts and blackouts.

We’ve noticed that in certain areas in San Diego, some blackouts and brownouts happening to some businesses, same thing in Texas. When the grid gets seriously constrained in the summer or cold days, so that’s that’s I love that you asked that question. I don’t think we will have that enough resources connected to serve the load in the next five years, which is why we need to, the urgency to get this done is important.

What will your company be doing that will take enough load off of the grid, to you know, to make a difference, make an impact, so that we don’t have some of the problems that were you foresee.

Yeah, the big one is with, like I said, the three phase opportunity is the best kilowatt hour is the one month used, that’s what I always say, and so what you think about that is we’re going into any facility that we do is to reduce the energy usage to the most efficient possible, now you’ve reduced that constraint, it’s never coming out right by that means the the grid or the power plants don’t have to produce that energy for that site due to the reduction. The second part is the the energy that is needed at the site at this new base level.

We can then have a battery at that site to manage when they need their energy, so the grid will be sending it at an average kilowatt, and they know this site is going to be getting this constant feed. It’s easier for them to predict anywhere to design versus when more gets more sites, more customers get online or get built. They don’t have to now be worrying about, like, what could be the new capacity within the peaks, and having to design new power plants, that’s what our company is trying to do, really reduce the need for utilities and help them predict the kilowatts on the kilowatt hours needed at certain areas.

So, in terms of companies’ growth, what kind of rate of growth are you experiencing now, and what do you expect in the years to come?

I’m not, I’m not limited to say the exact number, but I will say it’s one of the fastest that I’ve ever seen. A good example will be, and the one that is probably shown is like we’ve grown close to 40% per year, year over year, which is very, very hard to do in the energy business, and we expect the growth to at least keep on par with that, because we have a really high growth-minded CEO. He came from technology, he’s not a typical energy executive, and that’s kind of like the aim of what we’re going to go attack and get more sites enrolled, so that we can really, really solve this problem that we’re trying to talk, we’ve been talking about.

Well, that’s obviously an incredible growth rate. What do you all need to kind of keep that growth rate going?

It’s how our internal ecosystem works, but we need to keep that channeled in. A good example would be, let’s start from the front end, sales. Sales has done an incredible job setting up the pipelines for customers that literally don’t have the, how I say, the capex or the margin to do this themselves. That’s what we’ve been attacking, which is mostly the quick service restaurant business. To give you a statistic, curriculum restaurant business have the highest.

Energy density per square foot user in the country, and if you think about that, just dealing with it and figuring out how to really help them when they have low margins has been the way to grow for us. We have about eight, close to 9000 sites in general, most of it is quick server restaurants, that is definitely not, that’s like a drop in the bucket of all the quick service restaurants in America, so you can imagine that opportunity for growth there, that’s number one. Then we can also grow horizontally, we’re beginning to get into these bigger spaces like manufacturing, where the demand spikes are a little bit higher, and we can do more with solar and storage.

A good example will be the Gilman Brothers manufacturing we have in Connecticut, most of them are being in Connecticut, but we’re open to as many manufacturing facilities in the country as well that will really help us grow into places where batteries will even be more helpful. If that makes sense. Yeah, well, I’m kind of surprised that restaurants are so energy dense. I mean, they are fairly small footprints, but I guess it kind of makes sense.

They have a lot of refrigeration and heat that goes into making food, so I guess that does make some sense. And we do love our fast out here. So we have probably what I don’t know hundreds of thousands easily of locations in terms of the amount of people that are involved in in your company, how many, how many people currently work on your team or the total company, company right now, while close to 500 employees.

And then we have a bunch of contractors who work it off, because we’re in every 50, well, all 50 states, or we do installs in all 50 states, hard to manage if you have just 500 people, right, so the install, we have like an install a network of contractors, which we trust, are trusted in the industry that we are working in, which is mostly the restaurant business right now, but as we, like I said, as we expand into manufacturing, maybe opportunities in other aspects, other businesses, we will get more installers that are used to working at that sector.

Now, your virtual power plant just got named one of Time magazine’s best inventions for 2025 For someone who’s never heard of the term virtual power plant. What makes butterflies different, and why is this a big deal for small businesses?

Yeah, so it was a big deal for the company. A virtual power plant, to explain, is basically the idea of you being the secure of your own power and managing your own power. There’s a supply side and demand side of any energy. Supply side is typically where you get your power plants. These are the utilities of people that produce, use, you know, gas plants or nuclear, and they produce, and they transfer it to you through transmission lines and distribution lines. What we’re saying with the virtual power plant is we have a lot of monitoring systems, our distributed energy resource management system that manages all the equipment within your site.

So not just the energy producing, like solar energy storage, but also your energy users, like your, your heating and ventilation, your lighting, even like the controls for your refrigerators, your thermostats, and what we’re doing, what we did differently is it manages all of that together, and not just manages the energy produced, a lot of people just manage one or two aspects, we’re managing the whole, you know, component of energy, since we remember we took over your energy in essence based on the model, and that’s what makes it very, very good, because now we can understand where something is cannibalizing another, maybe the HVAC in this room is turning on, and if we turn it off, this HVAC will work too much. Therefore, you’re using too much power, so you have to kind of balance it right where maybe this one turns on a little bit, and then this ratchets up, because we have that data, and we see it live. That’s what makes Alex really special.

So you’re the person who decides whether a new technology like batteries or geothermal makes it into the Budderfly playbook. What’s your test for whether something is actually ready to scale, and what what’s currently exciting you that the listeners haven’t heard much about yet?

Yeah, a great question. Yeah, I have my criteria. So, the first one is, if it’s interesting, we’re going to try it. That’s the beauty of Budderfly. Our CEO is one of the few I’ve seen in the energy energy industry that is willing to just try anything. If we tell him we think it’s a cool item, he’s like, well, let’s go do it at 10 sites. That’s kind of like the model, and so. We do is well, that helps, right?

We can go out there, go to 10 sites of people that are interested, and test something. Once we test it, we’ll test it for technicality, like, does it save or produce as much as it claims, and can we live with what it says? Because a lot of times, people, you know, the marketing of the company will tell you, can do something you’ve realized we can’t even do up to a 10th of that, but let’s say sometimes it’s it can only do 50% of what they say. Can we live with what he said, like what we just tested? If we can live with that, we’ll have our own ROI template, like how much, how long does it need to be in the system for it to pay off for us, right? Because remember, we took over the bill, so we are trying to drive energy down or produce as much energy on site with the lowest amount of cost as possible, right.

So, ROI is very important for us, and so we measure it on that financial basis. So, once we test technicality, financial, the next question we then ask ourselves is, Do we have the right installer network to really scale this right, so we then test it with different installers within our network, or have our own team, like we have our own small team to go, and how easy is it for us to do this at a standard level? Because there are some good ones. I mean, let’s talk about nuclear. I know it’s like I like nuclear. Some people don’t. Let’s say we wanted to do nuclear power plants. It’s too possible, like SMRs, which are small modular reactors.

Sounds good on paper, produces energy at a low area that’s good, could be financially viable, depending on what is your raw material. The problem then becomes now, Who is actually going to do this? Is anybody trained in nuclear to install this? Right, so that’s the kind of questions we then asked ourselves. And then once it’s ready, once we’ve answered those three questions, then we know it’s ready to scale. If that makes sense. So that’s like what I like to do.

Matt 26:58
So, do we think that small module nuclear reactors are kind of ready for prime time, or they are they still something that are kind of likely to happen in the future.

I think I don’t think they’re ready for prime time, in my opinion. I know other companies disagree, because some companies, that’s their whole model, right, like that’s like their whole business model, what I think it.. it will be there are two things they also also worry about with small leaker, the small modular reactors. The customer, do they want.. do they have the affinity to want something like that near them, like knowing that there’s a nuclear reaction happening outside their house every day?

I don’t know if we’re ready, for some. Some people are. I am. I would like to see it, but I’m an engineer by heart. I don’t know if every business wants that, so that’s something they have to walk through. It’s the same thing we had with the EVs, right? EV charging range anxiety.. some people are like, we know EVs work well, but some people still have range anxiety, even though I think we’ve solved that problem. People are not going to buy EVs, because they’re just afraid that what if I get somewhere and I can’t charge. That’s the same issue we have with the small modular. And the second thing, too, is like, how do we even store the raw materials?

That’s the part that that’s what makes solar a little bit better, because solar doesn’t really have a raw material, right? It’s just the solar compared to small modular reactors. You have to figure out how do you store the materials you need. How do you supply it to that site? Are you going to have canisters or hydrogen for a fusion reaction? Are you going to have canisters of radioactive, you know, uranium? Like this is the question that I don’t think we’ve answered as a country yet. That will get you getting there, but I don’t think we’ve answered it yet.

Yeah, obviously they’re highly technical pieces of equipment that we have, you know, at any nuclear facility. Nuclear engineers and just whole teams of engineering people who’ve worked on that site for decades, so they have incredible institutional knowledge, and yeah, you may raise good points of how, how will you do that with a small modular reactor and still keep it safe? It’s.. I don’t know, I don’t know, anybody cracked that code yet? Is that.. I see them in the news, but I don’t know if anybody’s installed one here.

Yeah, I don’t know if they’ve – they’ve not installed it at scale. Let’s put it that way. I know a few sites may have it now, maybe data centers, maybe a few data centers, or industrial areas might have it, but you’re right. I haven’t seen it at scale yet. And also, we need to – the last thing to add to that is, how long do they actually last? We don’t know, right? Like, we don’t know if it’ll last the 1020, years that it’s supposed to, or it will fail in five. So that’s another thing we need to test before people want to buy it.

Yeah, right. Yeah, because they would imagine they’re not cheap.

Exactly, exactly.

You’ve said efficiency is to come before renewables, that cuts against the usual clean energy story, maybe that makes the case for why and why it matters right now more than it did, maybe say five years ago, and are you seeing other than your company, you see other innovators out there reducing usage rather than just putting on more capacity to produce power.

Yeah, to ask you the first question. Yeah, I do believe reducing energy before putting renewables is the right way to do it, because if you – a good example will be, let’s say we live. I live in Milwaukee right now. Say, Milwaukee needed.. I’m giving an example. I don’t think this is true, but let’s say they need one gigawatt hour of energy to really supply us, right? If we reduced it by 30% in 50% of our sites, now they don’t need one gigawatts to be built, they just need whatever that is, 15% of one gigawatt, you know, point eight for 850 megawatts, that saves land, that saves time, saves capital, you know, I mean, that’s the right way to do things, I think.

So we are on the precipice of doing it the right way, so that we can keep adding renewables to the actual energy we use, that’s number one, but in terms of the other part of your question, where other people that are doing it, we’ve not seen a company that are, that is like us, that takes it all as one, because we are the ones taking the risk and capital, therefore we try to do the how I say this the right way, we try to do it in a way where it’s the most efficient possible. Some other companies, there are other companies out there that do the performance type, whereas if you pay for this, you’ll get this much energy saving, like you get the best, or if you pay just a little, you get a little, right?

Like, you don’t have to buy the most efficient HVAC, you don’t have to buy the most, you just have to buy what you can afford. We took on the whole, so we took on the whole energy aspect for your company, and therefore we need the most energy drawn out of that business, where it doesn’t affect operations, and that’s where we buy the most efficient, and since we have you for 10 years to 15 years. If anything else has improved over that time, we can just do it for you. You don’t have to wait for it. We can just install it for you. I’d say, hey, we’re installing. We found a new thermostat that will reduce the energy by up to 50% Now we’re just going to do it for you, because we, we figured it out within the 10 years. That’s the beauty of what we do.

Yeah, I would imagine that you obviously have a lot more expertise in these areas rather than the average restaurant tour who, who isn’t studying energy issues and systems every day, which are getting more complex by the minute. So, yeah, I’m definitely a big believer in energy efficiency as being the way to go, and it certainly makes a lot of common sense. Have we have you seen any changes in the current administration, and were there opportunities with the IRA that have changed or dried up in the last, you know, since current administration took over.

Yeah, um, so in terms of the big beautiful bill that came out, it’s, it is affected mostly for what we do, mostly solar, we know that there’s like a sunset of the investment tax credit, so setting project just has to be done earlier than we expect, right. You have to buy some of the materials early now to qualify for that investment tax credit. They did not touch battery storage, which makes sense, because battery storage is not – it’s not a renewable or non-renewable, it’s a storage, it’s a buffer, like I said, right.

And that’s the beauty of what batteries do. So that does that was not affected by that at the administration, and also a lot of the energy efficiency things we do, we collect state incentives, and a lot of the state incentives were not affected by the administration, which is a good thing too, because utilities have their own, what’s the word, their own goals in mind for how they want things to be done, and so they have incentives for certain things to be installed, they have incentives for heat pumps, they have incentives for LEDs, they have incentives for certain HVAC units, and that has stayed that hasn’t really been affected by the administration. So that has been a good thing. The big one that has really affected our is solar. We’re just trying to figure out how to navigate new space with solar.

And so, what are your ideas in terms of navigating that new space with solar?

One of it is trying to buy, buy as many of the equipment as possible before the sunset. Happens, so that it qualifies for the ITC, because we bought it before it’s sunset. So, a good example will be if you have a site that we were going to do, not this year, but we’re going to do next year, we’ll take the risk and buy the panels now, because then they will qualify, even though we use it in 2027 when it’s sunset. That’s that’s kind of like some of the ways we’re doing it.

Another way will be looking into, I’m sure, a lot of solar companies, manufacturers are now like, okay, we don’t have the ITC anymore, we need to figure out how we reduce our cost to be cost-effective for people to use it versus gas, and so we’re now beginning to talk to people, and they’re working their ways to figure out how to reduce their costs as well, but short term we’re buying the ones we can find to qualify for the investment tax credit.

So, do you see the US industry in the solar business ratcheting up fast enough to deliver enough solar panels to the US customers that need them, or are we still having to import the vast majority from China and other countries?

I will say I don’t see that happening in the short term. It’s a good question. I don’t see the demand is going to be much higher than the supply for the US created. I don’t think we can ramp up that fast, but that’s not a bad thing, because I still figure out, like, we can get the ones we need from China to, or wherever else, to hold us till the sunset happens, and then a few companies start to ramp it up, those who want solar.

So, yeah, I don’t want to say it in the way that feels like, hey, if you wanted solar, now you should get it now. I will say that’s always been the thing, you should get solo when you can, because I think it’s once it’s on there, you’re getting free sun energy at your size, you should do it anyway. But I will say eventually to reach the point where the price will probably rise so high because of the demand, and then drop once they catch up, but it’s not going to be a steady send price.

So are you, is your company installing a fair amount of solar, and has it increased or decreased since 2025?

We, it’s the same right now, because a lot of restaurants is very hard to find roof space on the restaurant, so we have to go a lot of the solar we do is in non-restaurant sites, which we have very few of, so that has stayed the same, but we have seen an increase in interest from the non-restaurant business in solar bios, which has been a good lead for us, they’re seeing increasing their prices, they’re like, well, can you do solar for me? Can you, oh, you do battery too now? Because it’s a new thing we’re now doing. Oh, that will really help me with my demand charges. Yeah, we’re seeing an increase in that.

Have you seen any impact from what’s happening in the war in Iran regarding energy prices, and whether or not that’s had any impact on your business?

So there are two folds for that. One will be the energy itself, and then the actual equipment we ship, because sometimes the equipment supply chains get affected by war as well. I will say, I’ll start with the energy itself. The same energy increase that everybody’s seeing is what we are seeing, because a lot of places in the US still uses gas for their primary electricity, and therefore, as the gas prices went up, I can imagine that the fuel charges added to your bill went up as well, which we saw.

So, some sites are having increased rates at a higher rate than we expected, but remember we passed through those rates, so the effects on our bottom line is not, it’s not bad, let’s put it that way, it’s not bad, it’s not good. The next part is the actual supply chain, so the if you think about it from that perspective of like the war in that area. Now, most of the things we get is from either Asia, other parts of the US. It hasn’t really been affected by much in that sense. The kind of equipment we get, I think we already bought in bulk so far, and then anything that we need to buy extra. We are able to find it, even though the lead times have been increased a bit, but it’s not really affecting our business in the way that is making things like do or die right now.

So I understand you, your company is piloting some geothermal heat pumps, what what? What’s the stage that you’re at in terms of that process, and, and how is that looking to drive future growth?

Yeah, so still new, very new, because geothermal is very, very expensive, especially for small businesses, so we did a few. Pilots, maybe two or three sites, just to see how it will work within our model. We’re still evaluating the results of how that will help. Like, remember, I had that stage of technical feasibility, which we’ve proven it can work. Now we’re trying to work on the financial ROI for our model to see how we can make it work before we go. So we’re still in that second stage of evaluation, but I have high hopes for it, because I think that will be a really, really good way to not just a way to reduce the way you use energy at your site, but just a more environmentally friendly way to do heating and ventilation versus HVACs.

Sure, so you’re named an inventor on the Budderfly patents, including the work on recovering waste heat from HVAC systems. Maybe you can tell us some more about that.

Yeah, so we, me and a couple of the engineers at this company, we looked into some of the heat that’s coming off the exhaust of a HVAC, and we’re like, what if we put either a thermo electric, meaning like some kind of panel on top to heat to collect that heat and convert it directly to electricity, and so we designed a way to convert the wasted heat that comes off the top of a HVAC to hit the strips like it’s got these are common strips, thermo electric strips that convert heat to electricity once it hits that pamphlet, and use that to drive any tent within your site.

So it could be like a small wheel, it could be added to extra energy within the site, that was one of the things we, we finally tested it, was exciting to find that it actually could produce enough energy to do a little bit of work. Now it’s not a lot of work, it all depends on how big the HVAC is, for example, but you can get enough energy to make it useful.

Okay. Well, that’s that’s great, you know, every little bit helps, every piece that we save is valuable, so yeah, I tend to think that the way we solve our environmental problems is is creating systems that that make economic sense as well as environmental sense, so if we can tell the story to the business owner, to the investor, that this environmentally friendly way actually saves you money, that that will improve adoption and get us to our goal. If, if we’re just counting on people’s good feelings towards the environment, that’s just not going to probably close enough sales.

I agree. I agree, that’s something we’ve seen as well.

So, electricity demand is growing for the first time in roughly two decades, largely because of AI and electrification. How is this reshaping how your company is attacking these problems, and where do you see this kind of going in the future, is AI demand going to continue to rocket forward, or do you see maybe it might slow down at some point in time?

Yeah, so I’ll start with the first part. We definitely are ready, or trying to prepare for that AI increase in the demand due to AI, right? Like I mentioned before, we expect close to 25% increase in the country for demand of electricity over the next five years. That’s a lot, and certain areas are at risk. A good example of a area versus the Mid Atlantic, with Virginia, DC, there’s so much data center activity going on there, their grid is at risk, and I think that’s why PGM is doing a lot of programs with small businesses and as well as residential to figure out how they can get that better.

And so we are trying to just put an accelerant on programs like that, any program within an ISO or a utility that is thinking about increasing the participation of energy efficiency within their area, we want to be an accelerator that we look at those incentives, and then we go try and get sites signed up for our program. We also want to do the batteries, like having multiple batteries within an area will just help, and we can work with the utility, and they can tell us with a demand response program when they want us to discharge from the battery to our site, so that that site is off the grid for like those periods of time. That’s something we’re going to be helping with. Now, this one is not.

This one is more of my speculation on what I think AI will do. I think it’s going to reach the point where it will become a bubble, and then some, some areas, some people, some AI companies will fail. It’s just how it is, because I think there’s a lot of fraud right now. Everybody’s chasing AI, it will rise. There’ll be a correction, and then rise again steadily, so it’ll be a sharp rise in demand. Some companies will not do as well in AI, because I think everybody’s chasing the fraud. There’ll be a correction, and then it’ll rise again, but in a much steadier pace.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Are you helping any data centers or crypto, may you know, makers currently?

Not right now, but we will love to talk to any of them, anybody that is in crypto or data, we’ll love to talk to them, because we feel we can be a great partner to them. Where do you do if I have to think about the energy, like our whole ideas, we are your energy provider, your energy as a service company, and you just do what you want to do, like how you want to handle your crypto, your data centers, your EV charging. We’ll love to talk to anybody.

So, if you’re speaking to small business owners listening to this podcast, what are the.. what are maybe the first things that you would advise them as far as starting to cut their energy usage?

The first one I’ll say is make sure you have the right equipment for monitoring your energy, so the most upgraded timer starts keep up with your maintenance, because that really does plug in HVAC will work more. I mean, you can imagine you as a human being, if you have like a drainage, you can’t really even breathe as well. So, same thing with your HVAC, you need to clear those filters. Also, make sure you close the doors wherever, so that you’re not having wasted HVAC air flowing into your buildings.

Turn off the lights, like, just these are just the simple things to do, and then if you want a more comprehensive list, then we can go into your site, or whoever, either also any other energy efficiency company, and really look at, do a survey of all the equipment you have, see which ones are old, which ones are working properly, which ones should be replaced with the most efficient equipments right now, and then maintain it for the duration, so that you don’t even have to think about it going forward.

Very good advice, and we all can take these small steps towards energy efficiency, which I think you’re right. Every kilowatt hour we don’t use is really the best way we can probably solve this problem, or certainly a very good one. Thank you so much, Awadh, for being on the program. Great, you get to hear about what your company is doing. Sounds like you guys are doing incredible work to help save a lot of electricity, which is in all of our best interests.

So, yeah, thank you so much.

All the best going forward. If there’s any place that people can follow what you’re doing and your company’s doing, and, and is, I don’t know if there are investment opportunities now. Are you guys looking to go public?

So I’m not a liberty to say, per se. If we. I don’t, I don’t think we are going public, but I’m not a little bit to say on where, what the next step is. What I will say is we’re always open to investors, but on the debt side, because we buy all our equipment via debt or equity side, and so if anybody’s interested, they can just contact us at Budderfly. They can use my email, ibhade.eigbob@budderfly.com, ibhade.eigbobo@budderfly.com or they can reach out to any of us through any of the butterflies on LinkedIn.

We’re now on Instagram. I’m trying to get hip, right, and we’re, we are definitely open to as many talks as possible, because we really want to, the CEO has this vision that energy is being slowed down by bureaucracy, like bureaucracy, and just fear of trying to get things done. We’ve invented everything. Let’s just go do it. And so we’ve created a model to get things done, and so if you’re a business owner or you want to be an investor in this, just contact us, and you will see the accelerator we’re trying to put into this come up.

Okay, well, sounds good. Well, everybody, you heard it here, and follow the Budderfly website or Instagram and Facebook, wherever they are at, and check them out, and use their services to help decrease the energy usage. So, thank you, Ibhade, for being on the show.

So much, thank you for taking time.

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