Latest / Clean Power Hour / Digital Infrastructure for Decarbonizing the Built Environment with Jeff Coleman, Eli | EP151

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Digital Infrastructure for Decarbonizing the Built Environment with Jeff Coleman, Eli | EP151 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Jeff Coleman: Any, you can as a college research project, build a database of all of the programmes in the US. The challenge is building the system that is able to efficiently keep all of that accurate up to date and actionable.
• 1:06
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition? Here at the Clean Power Hour, our hosts Tim Montague and John Weaver bring you the best in solar batteries and clean technologies every week, I want to go deeper into decarbonisation. We do too.
• 1:20
  intro: We're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to together we can speed the energy transition.
• 1:34
  Tim Montague: Today on the Clean Power, our digital infrastructure for decarbonizing the built environment, I'm Tim Montague, your host Welcome to the Clean Power Hour. Please check out all of our content at Clean Power hour.com. Do us a favour tell a good friend who is passionate for the Clean Energy Transition about the show.
• 1:50
  Tim Montague: That's the best thing you can do for us and the energy transition, frankly, but also give us a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. We want more people to know about our wonderful library of content two shows a week, a pre recorded interview like this, and a live news roundup and interview that I do with my co host, John Weaver, shout out to John Weaver, aka commercial solar guy who is also a journalist for PV Magazine. Today on the Clean Power Hour, my guest is Jeff Coleman. He is the CEO and co founder of a company called Eli technologies. Welcome to the show, Jeff.
• 2:29
  Jeff Coleman: Excellent to be here.
• 2:31
  Tim Montague: So, you know, here we are in 2023, the energy transition is picking up steam, thank God. And we have you know, wonderful legislation in the United States called Ira the inflation Reduction Act, and chips to onshore and restore manufacturing of batteries and solar, and EVS and the machine that builds the machine. And, but we need better tools and technologies to make everyone's life easier, whether you're a utility or city, a contractor.
• 3:04
  Tim Montague: And, and that's what you guys are about creating a platform to make it easier for people to identify and apply incentives for energy efficiency and electrification of everything.
• 3:22
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• 3:39
  Tim Montague: The fourth generation Dino recently completed a technical review by DNV. You can download the report Adina watts.com, that's d n o w a tts.com. Now back to the show, tell us a little bit about yourself your journey in the energy industry, because it is storied. And then why you co founded Eli and then we'll geek out on what you guys are up to Sure thing.
• 4:08
  Jeff Coleman: Yeah, thanks for having me. So I, I started out my career at Earth justice to sort of a, you know, big environmental group. This was in 2002, or 2003. And I was very interested in this concept that at the time was was relatively new, that was the idea of climate change as a human rights issue. And while I was at Earth justice, we won sort of a big court victory in the international court, that was kind of the first time that a big body like that had acknowledged climate change as a human rights issue. And that was really the very beginning of my interest in climate, the kind of human connection in particular, and and who was being impacted and how. And after about five years there, I was lured away by a young senator named Barack Obama in 2007. To try my hand and politics, which is something I never thought I'd do, and join the Obama campaign really early, when on that whole journey. And as part of that, I started to work with some really brilliant folks. Many of them were just volunteers who worked at Google or Facebook, or something like that. And they came to us and said, Hey, we we build stuff with code, and we would love to help you win this election. What can we do and it took us a while to figure out how to get people like that involved. But we did.
• 5:40
  Jeff Coleman: And I had this profound experience of, you know, sitting on a conference call at 5pm talking about some challenge or problem we were having in the Texas primary and then getting on a call With ADM, the very next morning with a group of people who are like, we stayed up all night and we solved this problem, we built this thing.
• 5:55
  Jeff Coleman: Here you go. So I mentioned that just because I sort of, you know, there's the beginning of my interest in climate. And then that was the beginning of my interest in technology and working on software teams, product teams. I loved how fast we could kind of iterate through a problem and figure out solutions. And I loved being the person who was sort of focused on the work on the ground and what we needed to do in the real world. And bringing that back to the product team and trying to figure out what we could build this all of it. So after the campaign, I went into technology, startups worked mostly in sort of the political organising technology space for a while. And as I was about to have my first kid, sort of decided that it would be nice after kind of quite a long startup journey, to have a nine to five job for a little bit, or so I thought. And I was introduced to some folks at GRID Alternatives, which is, among other things, the largest nonprofit solar installer in the country, and really just a leading sort of thought leader on equity in climate, and in particular, clean energy and solar and bringing those technologies and all of the benefits of them to low income communities around the US. I joined grid in 2016, or 2016. I, my role was vice president of outreach, and that entailed sort of essentially bringing grids programmes, to the communities that we served and finding, you know, for grids solar programme, finding the families that would get a free solar system on their roof. And you would think that that's a pretty easy job, right, giving away solar, it was not, it was incredibly difficult. And one of the biggest challenges was that it costs us just as much to market free solar in these communities as it does for Sunrun, to sell it. And I just thought, fundamentally, that was a big problem that here we have these these amazing policies in California, which you know, one of the leading, you know, states but even, you know, a leader in the world in these types of policies, where large sums of money are being approved by the legislature to, to benefit low income communities and bring the benefits of clean energy to them. And yet, it was costing us, you know, 30% of that total funding just to get the money out there and start generating impact. So that I became interested in sort of this idea of how do we create more streamlined, more efficient ways of getting these funds out into the communities and helping people. And because of my background in tech, I immediately started looking at sort of digital infrastructure as a key part of that solution, not the whole solution. But that, essentially our lives these days, as consumers benefit from a whole lot of digital infrastructure that we don't really see and think about the ease of so many of the transactions we make, even buying a home is for for many people nowadays, less complicated than getting all the incentives you qualify for to you know, retrofit your home. So it struck me as as problematic.
• 10:04
  Jeff Coleman: And so I started digging into that, and discovered a whole host of challenges that I thought that software and technology could help solve. I brought together a team of folks that that I have worked with a bunch and we applied for and won a grant to build what is now called access clean California, which is the California Air Resources board's one stop shop for their vehicle programmes, their transportation equity programmes. So access clean, California was kind of where my team and I cut our teeth and learned a lot about this problem. And when the IRA passed, we thought, hey, there should be something like this everywhere for everyone. And we set off on this journey. There's no Ely technologies.
• 10:55
  Tim Montague: That's an amazing story. I love it. And I totally resonate. You know, I've been very involved with an organisation here in the Midwest, the Illinois Green Business Association, the GBA, we call it and it was very hard to get companies to participate in their programmes. So they're rolling out certification for small and medium businesses to become more energy efficient and sustainable. And, and so these these programmes, though, for energy efficiency are generally managed by state, local and, and then utilities. That is really the biggest way I'm guessing that concern MERS interface with energy efficiency. You know, and I've benefited directly I've, I've acquired several smart thermostats, for example, from these programmes in Illinois.
• 11:51
  Tim Montague: That in my utility is Amarin.
• 11:56
  Tim Montague: But, but then I think about, yeah, when when I want to retrofit my whole home, there's so many different aspects of that. There's the the insulation, the air tightness, the H vac system, the potential for putting solar on the roof, or in the yard, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It is dizzying and complex. And, and, and the onus is often on both parties, I would say, you know, it's on consumers, and it's on the contractors, and then other entities that are trying to facilitate the rollout of these programmes or not, I guess, that's my concern with utilities is they may or may not want to, I mean, it is a little awkward, right, that utilities are incentivized to sell kWh, for example, or therms of natural gas. And yet, they're in charge of rolling out these energy efficiency programmes. And that is a definite conflict of interest. And then the stories in the news and there's a big one in the news in Illinois, about graft in the you know, in politics where the utilities are lining the pockets of legislators, to influence the legislators and slow down the energy transition for all intents and purposes. So it is a it is a complex web that we have woven. And it the you know, technology is bursting at the seams like we have so much great technology now. We just need to deploy it as Tigger shallowest say, and can we do it fast enough, in order to stop catastrophic climate change from just kicking the shit out of us for decades to come? Right, it's not going to drive humans extinct. I think there's actually some other things that are more afraid. But it's going to kick our butts really hard, and especially low income people are going to really suffer from climate chaos and already are and we have mass migration happening across the globe because of climate change, and disruption of food systems because of climate change. And if if you're a truly a naysayer, you're in the wrong place.
• 14:20
  Tim Montague: Because this show is all about people who want to speed the energy transition, and who believed that this is a serious problem. But let's dig into Eli Jeff, and you were trying to explain it to me in the pre show. And maybe I'm just a little slow, but it sounds awfully complicated. But But what is Eli and the website? is Eli dot build? Check it out.
• 14:44
  Tim Montague: What is the lie? And how do well, who are your customers?
• 14:49
  Tim Montague: And what is the value proposition to your customers?
• 14:52
  Jeff Coleman: Sure. So first off, Eli is a very early stage technology company trying to do something really big. So I think, you know, your your sense that it's really complicated is also our sentence, I think we have a pretty thoughtful strategy about how to kind of take that complicated, challenge one step at a time and build something really, really big and essential for the future we all want to see. But where we are today is, you know, a small team of believers who have built something at the scale of one state that has had a really profound impact. And we see, as we started to think through how that could scale to the whole country or even beyond, we made a decision that in order to make it really easy for everybody to access all of the funding that they qualify for, and whether that's rebates, incentives or financing. To make that really easy, you need to have new and different infrastructure, not just a sort of website or a service in order to accomplish that. So Eli is starting with in order to take tackle this challenge, we're starting with building sort of the most comprehensive, accurate, thorough, sort of data set and and set of tooling to access all state local utility and federal climate rebates and incentives in the US. And that's a big task in and of itself. One of the big challenges, there's, you know, this is not static information, it's information. It's always almost daily, right? So that's actually the main challenge, right? It's it's not or, you know, any, you can, as a college research project, build a database of all of the programmes in the US, the challenge is building the system that is able to efficiently keep all of that accurate, up to date and actionable. And by actionable, I mean, not a sort of paragraph describing all the things you need to do to apply for this programme, but actually creating a really highly structured set of data that can be used to power a sort of decision making engine. So in other words, we want people everywhere, regardless of how their their, you know, accessing these programmes, whether it's through a contractor or through a utility or local government, to be able to put in some information about themselves, their house, their project, their building their business, whatever it is, and to be able to get back accurate, complete data that enables them first to make decisions, because it's really hard to make a decision without knowing how much something's going to cost. And right now, when you try to get down to how much is this going to cost me with many of these types of projects? The answer is it depends for steps 1234 And five of the process, you don't get to the actual bottom line until you've gone through quite a lot, right? So that's step one is, can we make it easy for people to make these decisions by empowering them with really accurate, complete information about costs, including incentives, financing, long term, you know, cost of operation, all that stuff. And then the second piece is actually getting them the money.
• 18:20
  Jeff Coleman: And so that's an even bigger net to crack rate. It's relatively easy to do that for one programme or one type of technology. But our goal is to essentially enable consumers in small businesses to get all of the funding they need right at the point of sale, and to handle processing incentives on the back end. And so that's a mix of technology and policy, there are programmes where we can do that already. There are some programmes that are not designed to be able to do that. So we have to get creative there and find other ways. So like most early technology companies, we have sort of a Northstar that we're always pointing towards, and that Northstar is make it easy for everybody, especially those with the most barriers, low income communities, disadvantaged communities, get make it easy for everybody to get every single penny that they qualify for, as fast as possible, as easy as possible.
• 19:14
  Jeff Coleman: And we're, we're working our way towards that one, one step at a time. So our customers right now are just sort of, of two kinds.
• 19:24
  Jeff Coleman: One is actual incentive programme administrators. So access clean California, for example, is a programme of the California Air Resources Board.
• 19:36
  Jeff Coleman: It's administered by GRID Alternatives. Our technology powers that experience, we aim to have as many of these programmes around the US as possible using our software to help them manage eligibility, income, verification, and kind of all of these processes. What we, what we learned in California, is that when you are launching an incentive programme like this, you have to build a bunch of things to enable things like taking applications over the internet, determining whether people qualify, and a lot of these programmes are spending a lot of money on essentially custom custom software development to build this stuff. It's a little more complicated than you can get from your typical kind of website person, it starts to get into the realm of software development. So there's so many of these programmes and so many new ones coming that we saw an opportunity to provide a piece of software that people can licence for a much more reasonable fee to handle those complex parts of that. So that's one type of customer is the program's themselves. And then the other type of customer is anybody manufacturing, distributing marketing, selling these decarbonisation technologies. So if you are, you know, an OEM who makes heat pumps, and you want your contractor network to have access to a simple tool that allows them to let their customers apply for incentives, you like empower that type of experience. And right now, we're infrastructure, right? We are a set of API's and kind of related tools that need to be integrated into a website or a piece of software, etc. And we eventually aim to build some some kind of more end user facing, you know, tools ourselves for the pipes.
• 21:20
  Jeff Coleman: So if
• 21:24
  Tim Montague: I'm a programme administrator, and you know, I've got the lay of the land that's, that's what I got a contract to do. If I'm a third party administrator, and but then and then and then you have this layer of OEMs. You mentioned, who are also incentivized to They really get it right and dial in and be able to communicate with their customers and their contractors.
• 21:47
  Tim Montague: And then the contractors customers, is it? Is it? Is it too duplicitous if both parties are using it? Or does that work out? Fine? No. So
• 22:00
  Jeff Coleman: I mean, the way I think of it is like in practice, the way these programmes work is most programmes have some kind of outreach and marketing effort for the programme itself. And one of the big challenges of the outreach and marketing in the past has been that. So I, let's say I administer a Clean Vehicle Rebate in California, I have this big organisation, and we get paid to administer this programme. We develop all his marketing materials for that programme, we have partners that we pay money to, to go out and market that programme. It's not our job. And we're not paid or incentivized to be on top of every single local and other type of incentive that those same consumers we're trying to reach might qualify for. So we're out there kind of marketing this one programme, and people are coming in through our website and applying for that programme. And we might put something in there that says you may also qualify for other incentives look around. But this concept that's become really important in and I would say there's a lot of folks at the federal level, and in this space, in general, who are thinking about this is stacking or braiding incentives, right, especially for low income communities, the difference between knowing that you might get $4,000 off of an Eevee and$11,000 off of an Eevee is the difference between being able to do it or not. And nobody's really taken responsibility for ensuring that people have access to all the things because the marketing and outreach has been distributed around across all these different programmes. So accessing California is an example of where, you know, we built technology for that. But there's also this really powerful outreach network of organisations. And because of the technology, those organisations are able to go out into communities and say, you could benefit from, you know, this funding that's available, all you need to do is go to access clean California and figure out what you qualify for.
• 23:58
  Jeff Coleman: And so they can kind of go out with a simple kind of call to action and a simpler message that doesn't put the work of decoding all of these programmes on the consumer themselves or on a contractor. So to get to your question about, say, the OEM, the heat pump, OEM, the way we think of it is, the reality of these programmes is is that if you look at, say, 1000, incentives that are processed, they're divided, the way that those consumers get to those incentives is through many different types of channels, right. So some consumers may their their, their heater breaks, they call a contractor, the contractor comes, gives them a quote for a new heater, if they're lucky enough to have a contractor who even includes heat pumps in that in that quote, they might say, Well, you might qualify for an incentive from it, but we need to get a bunch of information from you to figure that out. So people are coming at these programmes from different sources, essentially, so that the programmes themselves are marketing and getting people through their website. The contractors are out there. There's often other nonprofits and third parties involved. So we want to create a common set of shared infrastructure that is kind of bringing a source of truth to all of these different consumer journeys.
• 25:12
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• 25:45
  Tim Montague: Yeah. Let's talk about some case studies. You know, from a consumers perspective or a business owners perspective, okay, you've got transportation assets, you've got vehicles, you want to transition them from ice or hybrid to pure Evie. And, you know, there's there are federal incentives and there are state incentives and there may be some other more local incentives, but certainly federal and state. Why why is this even a difficult thing I guess, because, you know, we have 50 states or 50 states plus a few quasi states.
• 26:33
  Tim Montague: And not that many brands yet in the United States of EVs. Other go to Europe, you can buy I think something like 40 different brands of EVs now in Europe, it's crazy how that that ecosystem is exploding. But from a consumer perspective is this is this a hard thing?
• 26:57
  Jeff Coleman: So just to make sure I'm here, are you talking about like a fleet manager or an individual consumer in that scenario?
• 27:03
  Tim Montague: I mean, they're both good problems to solve.
• 27:06
  Tim Montague: It's both. And I like to say,
• 27:09
  Jeff Coleman: yeah, what? So I would say, for consumers, right vehicles are less complicated, I think, then then say, you know, H fac, or something like that.
• 27:20
  Jeff Coleman: But only a little bit, there's, they're still relatively complicated. And the part that's complicated it, there's a couple pieces to it. So one is, at what point in the process, you get sort of definitive answers about the dollar amounts of things. I mean, since I started doing this work, I've become sort of, you know, involuntarily, the person all of my friends and family go to when they're considering buying an Eevee. And it's amazing actually, the extent to which it's literally a case by case basis, each person that comes to me and a friend, the other day, they came to me asking about about EVs for his family of four and and it's like, I still have to, I can't give some straight answers, I still have to start Googling to make sure I've got everything straight. And that that thread gets particularly complicated with home charging and understanding that and like, just it, these are, these are new consumer journeys, like people have, obviously, you know, a lifetime of knowledge about the implications of an ice vehicle, a gas vehicle, when people go to buy an Eevee. For the first time, they have a lot of questions, some of them, you know, there's various good resources out there for figuring this stuff out. But the incentive piece is still like, for example, the rule changes around the federal tax credit that that came as a result of the IRA are very confusing for most consumers. And my family recently purchased an Eevee. And the dealer couldn't even answer questions about that. Right. So these are moving targets. Like I said earlier, it's a dynamic set of information, knowing you know, what, how to figure out whether the battery in your Eevee was assembled in the US or none of it was sourced in the US to qualify all these kinds of questions, right? Those are things that software can be really effective at at solving simply and easily for people.
• 29:19
  Jeff Coleman: And again, not as a separate thing that someone needs to go to Eli dot build to figure out, but as you know, when someone is browsing around on an EB OEMs website, they should be able to put in their zip code and see clearly which incentives are available in their area and what the total cost will end up being.
• 29:41
  Tim Montague: Yeah, you really put your finger on, I think what is vital here is that consumers are thinking about brands, generally speaking, if I'm going to upgrade my vehicle, I'm I'm looking at, if you're Tim Montague, I'm looking at Kia Honda I, Tesla, Ford. And that's about it. And so it has to it has to allow for the consumer to put that info into the system.
• 30:08
  Tim Montague: Because some brands are eligible for some incentives. And some aren't, because there are these wonky rules, which I think is an awful approach. About volume, right and how Tesla is generally not eligible for a lot of these incentives, because their production volumes are too high.
• 30:25
  Tim Montague: I'm like, Really guys, the company that actually started the Evie revolution in America, you're gonna somehow try to hold them back. I think that's ludicrous.
• 30:38
  Jeff Coleman: Well, that has changed right there there now that the IRH gloves off. Yeah.
• 30:40
  Jeff Coleman: So that those those caps on the number on the vehicle production have been lifted. However, new rules have been in place that are more about, you know, ensuring Battery Supply Chain stability in the US. And so there's new rules about what percentage of the battery materials are sourced in the US.
• 30:59
  Jeff Coleman: There's new rules about there's new price kind of price caps, like there's new income qualifications, if you're over certain income, you don't qualify for this, you qualify for that. Right. So
• 31:15
  Tim Montague: you're saying it's truly a level playing field for the OEMs.
• 31:18
  Jeff Coleman: I mean, I don't want to declare that it is a level playing field but that particular rule that you're talking about that put a limit on essentially the total number of vehicles sold is now is now lifted. So So now, in that regard, say Tesla does does qualify. However, there might be other other ways in which they don't, right so the called price the depending on. And even I mean, this is this is my job now and I still don't claim to be able to, like recite everything from memory. It's like, it's complicated stuff. So if, if the car is classified as an SUV, it can have a higher price point.
• 31:58
  Jeff Coleman: But if it's not, then there's a lower price cap on the price and who decides, you know, what's an SUV? And what's not? Is the model line SUV or is it not?
• 32:05
  Jeff Coleman: Right? So, all of these things for someone who's shopping for a car, they don't want, they don't care, they just just tell me how much this one's going to cost and tell me how much that one's going to cost.
• 32:17
  Tim Montague: And we're talking about one of the simplest problems.
• 32:20
  Jeff Coleman: The EVs are actually the simple.
• 32:24
  Tim Montague: The HVAC world and and other. And other things are, I'm sure more complicated. So if I'm a, if I'm a utility, though, or, or a programme manager, it sometimes it's one in the same sometimes it's multiple parties, I can see how, yeah, this might, this might be a nice way to really buff out my platform, I've been busily building a platform, historically of my own probably, or, you know, hiring some third party to build a platform. Or, and, you know, my understanding from what you've said so far is that you're kind of an operating system for these for these programmes. And, and your job is to make sure that the database, the back end is completely up to date. So that it just automatically gives the the end user the most up to date experience possible. Yeah, that's,
• 33:28
  Jeff Coleman: that's sort of step one, I think, you know, this is where we want to push for an experience that's even simpler and more integrated than that. And in many places, we already can do this. But the ultimate goal is, you're sitting, you're buying a car, you've put in your name and address and all this information like five times already. So there is no reason that you should then have to go to some other website to apply for your rebate, fill out all these forms all over again, right. And so what we're able to do, in some cases already in our pushing to be able to do as much as possible is to be able to actually push applicant data directly to the programmes to essentially process the incentive application, behind the scenes without the person needing to go initiate some other process and wait for a check to arrive. Right. So obviously, with tax credits is a little different, but for actual rebates are what we want to see as much as possible. And thankfully, some of these programmes from the IRA may well come out as point of sale rebates to start with, and that's great. But for all programmes as much as possible, you know, obviously, there's huge equity implications to making people wait to get the money. You know, lots and lots of people cannot front the government 1000s of dollars and waits to get that money at a later date. If they if they're going to be able to buy the car, or whatever, they need the money, they needed the price to be the price on the day they buy it, not wait six months to get the money. So is
• 35:04
  Tim Montague: that is that the is that one of the business lines that you're in is helping to get that money fronted?
• 35:09
  Jeff Coleman: Yeah, I mean, we're obviously early days in building the infrastructure for this at this phase. But that is that's the vision is to, you know, our Northstar is you just go buy the thing, and you get the price that reflects all of the rebates and you get the best possible financing. And that's the other piece of this, that we haven't talked a lot about is just that the financing landscape around this stuff is very fragmented. And there's not really a lot of kind of consumer friendly competition. Often, if you're, for example, you know, getting a heat pump installed in your home, typically, a contractor will just say, Well, here's the cash price, and here's the financing price. And you'd get your financing from our partner here, this, you know, credit union or whatever, there are increasingly you know, more lenders getting into the space, there are larger lenders who have been hesitant and are looking for opportunities to get involved. And then there are, you know, since our focus is, you know, heavily on low income and disadvantaged communities, there are a lot of really great programmes coming in some that already exists that provide, you know, sort of non predatory non subprime loans to people who otherwise might not be able to get them. And it's just hard to figure out what the best option is and what you qualify for and how to get it. And so, what we think we can do with software is just basically, you know, you tell you, here's the here's the the best possible kind of capital stack for lack of a less technical term like here's the best money available to you to do this thing you want to do, right? Is the best loan option we can find here are the incentives you qualify for, and here's all the money and we'll handle the paperwork.
• 36:53
  Tim Montague: I mean, in a perfect world, it seems to me like, the United States would just say, we're gonna roll this out for every American, no matter where they live. And you as a consumer can access this information, it's fine that others are going to access it as well. But like, that's one of the things that irks me about democracy and the United States versus China, where they have this command and control economy. And they can just decide okay, we are going to make 100 year plan to execute on the on the energy transition.
• 37:30
  Tim Montague: And, and in the US, we're going in fits and starts, depending on the way the weather's blowing, and the wind is blowing. And that's, that's, that's clearly, you know, inefficient. So, I heard Senator Mark Kelly quip on stage this morning that, you know, if, if the Senate had been in charge of getting to the moon, the rocket would have never left the pad. And so I bought time, he's a four time, you know, spacefaring astronaut, in his previous life, but But so, I'm excited. Okay, I'm very interested in this. What we're talking about is reducing the soft costs, and and the amount of brain cycles that anybody whether you're a consumer or a contractor, and a programming administrator needs to spend, I mean, the the value proposition here is tremendous. How do we pay for this? And, you know, what, what do you say to other states, okay, you're, you're, you're, you're living in lala land, forgive that forgive my, my snide comment here. But, you know, California is 10 years ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to these things.
• 38:52
  Tim Montague: And it's a major state a major economy, we want California to continue to be a thought leader.
• 38:56
  Tim Montague: But what do you say to Illinois, or Ohio, or Florida? Or, you know, some of the slower moving places? And how do we also embrace this new technology?
• 39:14
  Tim Montague: Well,
• 39:15
  Jeff Coleman: you know, first off, obviously, the IRA is is good news on that front, and there may be some variance in how states roll it out and how effective they are at that. I mean, obviously, yeah, California is certainly, I think ahead on many fronts, and also just big. So, so not a not a representative sample. But, you know, there are a lot of other states who who I mean, Maine has an Efficiency Maine is an incredible programme. In fact, I would say like, I would, I wish there was something like that in California that was as comprehensive and effective. You know, there's Michigan is, is doing a lot of really great stuff, the Michigan saves programme. So there's, there are lots of bright spots, I would say now, and with the IRA, hopefully many, many more coming, we're talking to lots of states state energy offices. And I think the way I think of that is that, you know, the IRA is kind of a baseline, right? If there's, if there's a state that really doesn't have a lot going on, on this front, that's all the more reason, actually, that they should talk to us, frankly, is that if, if you have an efficiency main type programme, right, you're this infusion of funding to stand up new programmes through the IRA, it's sort of easy to plug into your existing infrastructure. In a state that has not done a lot of work on this front. There's a lot of work to do to just get a programme, you know, to stand up a new programme to build a website to, you know, build an effective outreach and marketing campaign around it. All of that stuff is a lot of work in and I think there is, you know, bringing good news to the conversation. There's a whole community of organisations and coalition's and folks who have done this stuff in places like California and other in other states like Maine, who are working to try and create, you know, for example, the building decarbonisation coalition is as this wonderful kind of consumer marketing campaign in a box that they have called the switches on that has been really successful in California and they want to bring that to other states and they're able to go into a state that doesn't have a lot of their own infrastructure and say, Hey, what we can help you stand up a really effective statewide marketing campaign for building electrification. We have you know, customizable marketing materials. We have all of these resources. And so, you know, the IRA has spurred this huge kind of effort to try and stand up a lot of new infrastructure. We very much aim to be a part of that. But just a part. I mean, you know, this is I'm sure you felt the same way as when you're, when you're focused on climate change, you really need to kind of pick a place where you feel like you can have some measurable impact, and push with all your might, knowing that it's going to take a bajillion other people doing the same thing. So it's very hard problem to wrap your head around and say, Well, I'm going to make sure all of this gets solved.
• 42:20
  Jeff Coleman: And so our approach is, you know, we're, we're a small but mighty team, and we want to build this kind of critical piece of infrastructure, but we very much will be relying on a lot of other folks to pick up the ball and run with it to have the impact we want to have.
• 42:36
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I mean, it does. It does make me think that if you're at all involved in this world, as a, as a state, or a local authority, that this platform would give you a way to compare what's going on in your state to other states and get ideas. I googled the question, you know, show me a map of energy efficiency programmes or our scoring, energy efficiency programmes, and I discovered an organisation called AC AC II, the American Council for an energy efficient economy. And, and they have a lovely map on their, on their policy. It's called the state policy scorecard. And there's tremendous overlap in this and where this where, for example, renewable energy is happening.
• 43:31
  Tim Montague: The number one is California.
• 43:35
  Tim Montague: Number two is Massachusetts.
• 43:35
  Tim Montague: Number three is New York, Vermont, Maine, DC, Rhode Island, Maryland, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, New Jersey, Michigan, Illinois. My state comes in number 16. Unfortunately, we're a top five state for clean energy. But so there's many ways that people could use this platform, what is the status of Eli? And when are you doing like a full launch and rollout to too many places?
• 44:07
  Jeff Coleman: So we are, you know, we have a small set of kind of pilot customers, beta beta customers, using our software now. We're basically every day deepening our dataset around local and utility programmes in particular, we have a pretty robust data set around state level and federal programmes or, and yeah, we're going to be launching in earnest later this year, probably mid summer, late summer, that's timed a little bit with when the Department of Energy will be issuing kind of the guidelines and the guidance to states for implementing the IRA. And, you know, that's where we aim to have a lot of impact, is it helping is anywhere possible to help the states launch these programmes. And you know, we are, we are far from a partisan organisation. But we would like to see a lot more programmes like the IRA and a lot more money funnelled into the IRA.
• 45:06
  Jeff Coleman: And we know that that is inextricably tied to politics.
• 45:09
  Jeff Coleman: And we want to be a part of helping to demonstrate the success of the IRA. As fast as possible. I think, you know, we don't want to see it take five years for people to actually go look around and say, hey, wow, that law that passed made a big difference. We want to show that that impact as quickly as possible so that we can get more because, frankly, as ginormous as the IRA is it's nowhere near big enough. And that's not a criticism of the political process is just the realities like we're going to need more money appropriated for these programmes in the future, for sure. So our approach to that is not to go, I don't ever want to work on a political campaign.
• 45:49
  Jeff Coleman: Again, I would like to help just, you know, put our money where our mouth is and show the world that this these policies make a big difference.
• 46:00
  Tim Montague: I have one last question. And I'm thinking about the people that are making sure the database is up to date. So they're scouring all these websites, and they're now narrow AI eyes like chat GPT that make this problem much easier, I think, is machine learning and AI something that Eli is leveraging?
• 46:23
  Jeff Coleman: Yes. Frankly, almost any software company that you would interview today would say yes to that answer. If you're not at least exploring how those tools can help you build what you want to build, you're probably going to end up being behind. So yeah, we are we are leveraging those tools. Um, I would say, you know, the reality of this problem is that it's one of many I think that that is, you know, similar to say, say healthcare is like, AI can be a powerful assistant. But it can never be the decider, because the stakes of getting it wrong are too high. When we get into like, financial, there's a lot of like, important trust and security based things when you're dealing with
• 47:10
  Tim Montague: humans to fact to do the fact checking in the ultimate switch flipping. I'm not suggesting that we just unleashed the bots. But yeah, but the bots, you know, they can work while we're sleeping. And, and and make sure that, you know, when when there are new incentives that they get filtered through to the consumer, right.
• 47:30
  Jeff Coleman: Yeah. The tricky thing is that I mean, without getting too in the weeds, The tricky thing is that there's a tonne of, you know, these kinds of text base models, there's a tonne of inaccurate text out there. And so, you know, the process of determining what the actual source of truth is, is a difficult one, because even the program's themselves have inaccurate information on their own website in many cases. So
• 47:58
  Tim Montague: I love the ads, there's somebody is running ads that say if you live in Illinois, the government will pay you to go solar. Yeah. You know, making it sound like it's a completely free lunch. It is not a free lunch. Okay. And that kind of misinformation is really irritating and ubiquitous. But Well, Jeff, this is wonderful. I look forward to catching up with you in a year or two and you know, seeing how things are going. And please let me know when I can use Eli in Illinois.
• 48:33
  Jeff Coleman: Well, yeah, yeah, great chatting with you, Tim.
• 48:35
  Tim Montague: The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by Dena watts. If you're a solar PV asset manager or performance engineer, you need better data and better business intelligence. With Dina wants digital twin benchmarking technology you get more accurate, efficient, and faster performance measurement results.
• 48:51
  Tim Montague: The fourth generation Dino recently completed a technical review by DNV you can download the report at Dena watts.com.
• 48:59
  Tim Montague: That's D no wa t t s.com. Now back to the show. Please check out all of our content at clean power hour.com Give us a rating and a review. Tell a friend tell an energy professional or aspiring energy professional about the Clean Power Hour.
• 49:16
  Tim Montague: That's the best way that you can help to speed the energy transition and give us a rating and review. I would love to hear from my listeners as well. If you have ideas for guests or topics that we can cover in these interviews or on our Thursday lives. Please reach out to me Tim at Clean Power hour.com. Jeff, how can our listeners find you Eli dot build excellent hair. That is very simple. Eli Dodd bill does the website and you're also on LinkedIn. I want to thank Jeff Coleman, the CEO and co founder of Eli for coming on the show today. Thank you so much.
• 49:55
  Tim Montague: Thanks, Tim.