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Streamlining Clean Energy Finance with Amanda Li | EP179 · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Tim Montague: I think you'll see that, Amanda, my guest today, Amanda Li, the COO of Banyan Infrastructure is just so enthusiastic for what she's about disrupting project finance in the clean energy transition.
• 1:05
  Tim Montague: It's very infectious. And she's clearly a super capable successful. Employee Number Three at Generate Capital, my goodness, like what a track record. But she's been building Banyon for five years. They close on a series B, round of funding in 2023. So they're off to the races, they have 50 employees, now, they're scaling, and they're getting traction.
• 1:34
  Tim Montague: And, you know, our mission here at the Clean Power Hour is to speed the energy transition. And I truly believe that platforms like Bamyan are doing just that.
• 1:47
  Tim Montague: They are making it easier to get stuff deployed to decarbonize the economy, that's the bottom dollar here. So with that, I give you Amanda Li.
• 1:59
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition? Here at the clean power our 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 two, we're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get together we can speed the energy transition.
• 2:27
  Tim Montague: Today on the Clean Power Hour easing project finance for the clean energy transition, you know, the energy transition is $100 trillion opportunity. But we need to deploy, deploy, deploy as Jigar Shar likes to say, My guest today is Amanda Li. She is the COO and co founder of a company called Banyan Infrastructure.
• 2:45
  Tim Montague: And they are deploying a platform to make it a lot easier to scale finance in the clean energy transition. So welcome to the show, Amanda.
• 2:56
  Amanda Li: Thank you. Great to be here.
• 2:59
  Tim Montague: You also happen to have worked for Jager. So I understand you are an early employee at Generate Capital.
• 3:04
  Tim Montague: And at some point during the interview, I would love to hear a little bit about that. But give our listeners a little background on yourself. How did you get interested in the energy transition at all? And then how did you come to cofound? Benyon?
• 3:20
  Tim Montague: Oh,
• 3:20
  Amanda Li: yeah, I think I've been at it for a bit now. You know, where, you know, there wasn't an aha moment I decided I wanted to come to Climats Why did it since you know, school and was involved since the cleantech 1.0 days, first job out of school was in solar and fuel cells, but then realized I was an engineer by training realized was not long for getting a PhD and inventing something, probably not smart enough as well. But was, you know, very excited to learn that, you know, a lot of the transition could be benefited not just by invention, but to your point and by deployment, right? Deploy, deploy, deploy, and I could help out over there.
• 4:03
  Amanda Li: And so one from being an engineer in the clean tech space to figure out how I can help out on the business side of things.
• 4:11
  Amanda Li: And so after security, its route through other startups consulting, landed at Generate Capital, and was the first employee there. And so it was just Scott jigger and myself that would generate was only$100 million, not the $8 billion machine is today. And so I don't have to go into it quite yet.
• 4:33
  Amanda Li: But now a lot of lessons there.
• 4:33
  Amanda Li: But the short of it is, is basically came out of it, knowing there needs to be a tool and eventually building a tool that I wish I had. And that has Dannion. Yeah.
• 4:46
  Tim Montague: Well, I mean, in the background, having been a generate is so perfect for what you're doing at Banyan. I mean, I don't I can't imagine a more perfect background, actually. So thank you for doing what you're doing. And for those of you who don't know, tell us a little bit about generate because jigger is is pretty much a household name in the solar industry because of SunEdison. But people no less I think about generate and of course now he's the head of the loan program office at the DOE but tell us about generate and then we'll get into Banyon
• 5:21
  Amanda Li: yeah generate is a PVC that looking to invest and own and operate the various types of technologies that will will need in this energy transition. So think of it as the capital and the operations for not just solar and wind and energy efficiency, but anything that is sustainable infrastructure, including transportation, water systems, AG, if it can be project finance, if it has its an infrastructure asset helping that transition, it's something that generates looking at, and is looking to try to figure out how to deploy capital to those assets or those platforms so they can go then built. These were the models that digger brought in, and the rest of the team that was to say that, hey, in this transition, if we can make it faster and cheaper to invest in these assets, then we will be able to meet our goals, right, and you'll be financing as a tool capital markets as a tool is an incredibly powerful one. And, you know, there's going to be trillions of dollars needed for that, and generate is one of those parties of trillions of dollars
• 6:32
  Tim Montague: and generate, you know, is mission driven, right, they are focused on sustainable technologies that we'll turn so to speak, right, technologies mature. And I just heard through the grapevine that, for example, generate isn't that interested in solar PV anymore? Because that's kind of old hat. And they're moving into more emerging tech, like, you know, hydrogen or other long duration storage technologies. And I don't know, you know, when you think about sustainability writ large, if there are certain segments that you get more excited about than others?
• 7:11
  Amanda Li: No, I'm excited across the entire spectrum, right, we'll need everything I mean, at the end of the day, like solar, while solar is mature, in some ways, compared to newer technologies, it's still very small a nascent compared to larger, more mature industries, like the oil and gas industry, right and, and broader, more traditional infrastructures. And so everything, we still need plenty of more solar, plenty more wind.
• 7:32
  Amanda Li: But we'll also need to have those investors and companies chasing the earlier stage technology as well, and helping them scale and be able to find fit, right. And so we think around more energy storage, you know, the nature based solutions and carbon capture a lot to be sat around the pros and cons of hydrogen seen radiation, fuel, a lot of interesting new segments coming up. And all of it will be important if we want to tackle this problem. And but what's really convenient is that all of it can be financed in a very similar format, right? At the end of the day, whether you're generating your electricity from solar, right, and you're tracking the performance of its cash flows and the underlying performance of the asset, whether it's generating the energy that you expected to, or you're using a newer technology, right, so you've got some sort of modular nuclear reactor, right? At the end of the day, you're still trying to track its cash flow and tracking whether it's performed, right? And so how can we bring the learnings from these more mature industries to the new ones, that's what interests me, all of it should look really similar.
• 8:40
  Amanda Li: And the more of it looks like similar energy assets, efficiency assets, right transportation assets, the easier it will be to finance them because we were creating a shared language.
• 8:54
  Tim Montague: Yeah. And, and so when when we think about the energy transition, we think about a lot of solar wind and batteries for you know, just to name three technologies, right?
• 9:07
  Tim Montague: The grid is eventually going to be probably 90%, wind and solar that includes utility scale, community scale, Digi, and residential, the full spectrum, and those industries are being financed today. So how is it that the advent of Banyan is going to facilitate or accelerate the financing of the energy transition? Well, even
• 9:34
  Amanda Li: in those industries, right, we can afford to be cheaper and go faster and find more liquidity, right. And so if we target each of those, right, the amount of overhead in each of these deals still have a lot of room to go down. Right? I know, large donor your guest status across the capital stack, right. But as it's off one of the many software providers in the solar and wind energy world, the goal is how can we make it more accessible, cheaper overall, and cap in capital markets, that is a large portion of cost as well, right? Leaning towards talk to large project finance banks, where they have a half a million to a million dollar cost just to close a transaction, right, paying out the lawyers and brokers. You know, if you have a half a million dollar costs there to just close the transaction, you're not gonna be looking at a$5 million deal, or a $10 million deal. It's it's way too expensive. And so how can we make it cheaper by reducing the amount of work that needs to go into it's finding ways to automate certain of the workflow both upfront and ongoing, right?
• 10:35
  Amanda Li: Because guess what, after the transaction is done, we're going to need to have a group of people to manage the risk and to be able to manage the ongoing compliance of the assets and there's not enough people even if you want to hire them to have an army of analysts and Even if there was, they probably wouldn't want the job called stare at numbers for on spreadsheets all day long to just scrub it and figure out what's going on. Right? They want to analyze it, not gather that data. So that's on cost, then we have entire bucket around speed, right, which is that it needs to be faster, right faster to understand what we're investing in faster to make that decision faster to bundle it up and trade it right.
• 11:14
  Amanda Li: Efficient capital markets, right, we think around our colleagues in the real estate markets, right, incredibly standardized in some areas, incredibly liquid, because everyone's talking the same language, we can make an investment decision much quicker, and then be able to bundle it and trade it to somebody else. Because we understand what we're talking about. You know, we see some of these, even in the solar wind space transactions are taking months at a time to deploy. And there is time to move that down.
• 11:40
  Amanda Li: Right? Especially if you're looking at smaller scale investments, right? If you are doing community solar, right, how can we bring that into a matter of weeks, rather than a matter of months to make that transaction? And then finally, liquidity, right when you bundle people in. And so you know, the ways to roll up 100 Small community projects means that we have to make them look similar.
• 11:58
  Amanda Li: And that's a great thing that software can do some of these larger banks, even if you're decreased all of your overhead, they're not looking to make $5 million checks, right? They're looking to do $100 million at a time. How do we make it easier for those who are writing $5 million checks to get that back leverage by taking a number of$5 million projects and selling it upwards? So so let's see them liquidity.
• 12:24
  Tim Montague: So let's paint.
• 12:24
  Tim Montague: Let's paint a picture before Banyan after Banyan before Banyan there's a lot of geeks using spreadsheets and crunching numbers. And it's time consuming and there's friction and it's bespoke projects. And there's not a common language after Banyon. Everything is more standardized and somewhat automated. But what do you estimate is the the factor the X Factor? Is this 5x? You know, accelerant? Or what, how do you how do you sell the value proposition? Yeah,
• 13:04
  Amanda Li: we like to say we're getting anywhere between two to 10x, some of those transaction speeds. And so that's what we're trying to lower it down from depending on how far you're leaning in to some of the the the transaction flows and how efficient it was before on an operational perspective, the overhead we're reducing, as you know, looking upwards of 150 pips on that transaction. And so anyone who's looking for that extra margin in the deal, that's a lot of margin to find, right, and part of it from seeing from our customers. But frankly, we're following a very well trodden roadmap, we see that when FinTech has come into other financial services industries, and there are FinTech products for auto loans. And again, commercial real estate and, you know, SMB lending products, right? By me anywhere from 100 to 200. pips is not uncommon.
• 13:49
  Amanda Li: And that just makes a lot of deals more in the rat, right?
• 13:52
  Amanda Li: And where's it coming from? Yes, it is coming from a law that's blocking and tackling, right, it's, you know, you're not paying a lawyer $1,000 an hour to manage a closing checklist and a Word document, you're not hiring 10 analysts to do your job. That's, you know, half the number of analysts could be doing to report on portfolio level IRR. You're not You're not baking in liquidity premiums.
• 14:11
  Amanda Li: And huge DSCR is because you have better insight into your your risk and your overhead and better ability to trade.
• 14:22
  Tim Montague: So paint us more of a picture, though of the platform. And what does it consist of? are you leveraging, for example, machine learning?
• 14:29
  Tim Montague: Does the does the model get smarter as it goes? And faster?
• 14:33
  Tim Montague: And better? Or yeah, tell us about the about the platform and who are your core customers?
• 14:43
  Amanda Li: Yeah, I think at the moment, it's a lot of crawl before we run in in the project finance industry today, right?
• 14:51
  Amanda Li: If we think around all these exciting things around AI and machine learning, you know, another few years ago is all about blockchain. Right? None of these technologies are possible if you don't first have a good consistent set of data, right?
• 15:05
  Amanda Li: To train off of, to analyze, to create, you know, clear audit trails of what you're feeding in, right? Bad data in is bad data out. And so we can't even go there yet. Right? I know everyone else is, you know, where I sit in Silicon Valley here is talking about AI. We're talking to some project finance ears that are managing their deal flow on their desktop on a one note, or a piece of paper, right? We're talking about managing your portfolio outcomes on a spreadsheet that's offline.
• 15:36
  Amanda Li: And when you're checking a reserve account to log into a bank account and stare a number and PDF, that view to ensure you're in compliance, right.
• 15:43
  Amanda Li: These are things that other industries have figured out. 20 years back in the first wave of digital technology adoption.
• 15:51
  Amanda Li: That's where we're starting off with our platform, basic workflow automation, basic data aggregation, and then working to basic analytics. What that looks like is, hey, if you are a developer and a fund who are collaborating, right, how do we make it so that as you're submitting documents and details, looking for approvals, it's happening online, rather than sending a spreadsheet back and forth asking you what the address of the site is, you know, what the address is in there, you're not typing it seven different times, or the analyst isn't taking it from the spreadsheet and putting it somewhere else. It's already in the system and can be used to help you understand your exposure for geography. Once you're closing, you understand the full audit trail, you understand the compliance, love the chapter, all of that, because there's a lot of compliance coming up with the IRA. And then once it's closed, you really have a streamlined risk and portfolio management tool that can let you know portfolio level views of what's going on IRR, cash flows, your carbon equivalent offsets that you care about the impact metrics at the portfolio level, and then be able to drill down into sub portfolios, individual deals, individual assets, and say, Hey, what's going on here?
• 17:04
  Amanda Li: Right, I have a trigger alert, something's going wrong. Looks like it was this assets that has lower revenues. And it was because it had lower performance. And so I described all their tips here to answer your question is basic work mid and back office automation analytic software, in some ways, not really sexy, we hope to get the entire industry towards AI, this is a data you can use to train an AI model. But we'd be thrilled if people just got off of, you know, you know, offline systems.
• 17:32
  Tim Montague: So I understand it that, you know, certainly asset owners and finance ears will want to use this other other groups that are potential customers for Banyon.
• 17:46
  Amanda Li: Yeah, we're starting to see a lot of developers, you know, come onto the platform as well, there is already a module where the funds invite the developers in, so they can collaborate on the transaction, and share deal details. But we're seeing some developers also be interested in having those tools for themselves.
• 18:01
  Amanda Li: We're really excited that earlier than any developer thinks about bankability, the better, right, you want to not wait till the last moment to realize that something was an issue for a bank or a financier?
• 18:14
  Amanda Li: Or isn't eligible for a certain tax credit? So the earlier there is sort of an understanding of what's needed the health areas for the project and oftentimes those those steps aren't done because it's overhead, right, and the deals sort of immature still. So why do it early? Well, if it's easy to do early, that's an interesting segment. But frankly, if it's really the owner operators, the funds that are are mainly the the the core buyers of the assets we have anywhere from like really big bank like SMBC to specialty funds like New York Green Bank, to IPPs owner operators, like standard solar.
• 18:51
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• 19:27
  Tim Montague: Yeah, makes sense. So you mentioned you mentioned the IRA, the inflation Reduction Act.
• 19:34
  Tim Montague: What what's what's the story? I mean, we talk a lot about the inflation reduction act on the show here, of course, it's a it's a huge boon for the clean energy transition, unlike anything we've seen in the in the United States or frankly, globally before, and it's and it's a very good thing. It's not that there aren't some headwinds, you know, in inflation has been a problem for especially DG solar this year, right? DG sola is down and kind of taking it on the chin. it'll bounce back things have been flowing in, in the energy transition, we call it the solar coaster. It's, it's just, it's just part of the ride. Like it's, it's to be expected. But frankly, it's game on right.
• 20:22
  Tim Montague: Like we are now installing gigawatts and gigawatts of wind and solar and batteries. And, and truly chasing after a carbon free economy. I like to say, um, and, you know, that's the easy part. The 40 gigatons of carbon that we have to get out of the economy is child's play relative to the 1000 gigatons that's already in the atmosphere, and also needs to be decarbonized.
• 20:49
  Tim Montague: And I don't know if you have any magic bullets for that? But if you do, let us know. Now,
• 20:55
  Amanda Li: I think a number of things this yes, there was no magic bullet wish I had one of those. I do think a lot of the IRAs benefits around bringing in some of the newer technologies being so that the ITC and the PC TC opened up beyond sort of your traditional solar and wind, that there are specific credits to some of these new technologies that will help with these larger problems. That's really beneficial. But broadly, I think the the conversation we often have within Banyan here is that Leah, let's celebrate the IRA, you know, heard a number of your podcasts here that are describing the impact and the possibilities. But here, it's like, Hey, what are the you know, what are the ways that this is actually adding a lot of overhead? And how can we really help here, right, we're finally, you know, over a year in, and we're hopefully, we're hopefully getting more tactical about the implementation of the IRA. We know there's a lot of rulings still being clarified. But, you know, it feels like the very beginning of like, corolle, right, like free money. But to really get the full scale of benefits, it is more compliance, right, it is chasing more of the Digi deals that are struggling a little bit. But that's where they're the highest number of benefits, it will be tackling all the problems I discussed earlier, which is that smaller scale projects and higher volumes need to be done quickly, need to be done with less overheads needed to be nailed down with more compliance, because each one of these adders has a ton of rules around it.
• 23:18
  Amanda Li: And all of that without increasing risk, or having some sort of audit trail that won't slip up to the IRS. Right. And that's a huge place that we could play, where it's like, how do you make again, faster, easier to do the audits to do the compliance, to make the decisions for the small scale assets to reap the full benefits of the IRA? Both for small scale projects and larger scale projects and new technologies?
• 23:50
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I don't know what I don't know. And I'm kind of happy. I don't know all those things. It sounds a little intimidating. But But I get it like, we need to make project finance easier. bottom bottom line, right, easier, faster, and more standardized? You know, how do how do you guys see how does Banyans see the the impact of the IRA?
• 24:17
  Amanda Li: I think its overall impact, you know, that probably many more economists can talk through the the bigger numbers, but we're talking about I think, how, in terms of the impact that we can drive there, it's that there there is those complexities right. To your point, Tim, right. If you know, there are a lot of people saying we don't know, we don't know, right, we're gonna have to, to take advantage of the benefits, be able to comply to a larger number of roles, be able to take advantage of certain areas of these matters. And everyone's sort of figuring out right now, right and be de facto, what might happen is that you could pay an advisor or lawyer, many fees or consultants to be able to help you out there. But those are dollars that could be going towards projects or making certain deals more bankable. And so whereas we can't speak as well about the total possible impact, right? What we can say is we will never achieve whichever is the total possible impact, without the ability to say, Hey, make it easier. So that, you know, experts, like yourself, are saying, Hey, we all know all these complexities, right? Everyone's going to have to understand it, if we want to get those benefits, right. And so it should be Hey, how can you have a clear checklist that tells you whether you satisfy wages in apprenticeship requirements, domestic content, right, whether you're in a disadvantaged community, and do that as early as possible, both for the developer to have confidence that they will qualify, but also as a financier to be able to quickly understand that that the project has juice.
• 25:49
  Amanda Li: This also adds an extra complexity, and stop me from getting too much in the weeds here. But that there are new players coming out also on the financier side, right. There's the JDRF Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which is $27 billion. That's funding more community lenders and community and green banks, some of which are new to building out these community solar programs or EB charging programs. Now, so not only are their developers figuring out what they need to submit, there are new banks and funds that are trying to figure out what they're trying to collect. And all of that can potentially be helped out by having a common language and standards around how this is done. And what is best practice.
• 26:31
  Amanda Li: And those are features that we're we're rolling out as fast as we can and taking advantage of a lot of our our prior compliance features.
• 26:40
  Tim Montague: So when you think about the World before 2018, when you launched Banyan and the world today that has been in, who are you putting out of business? Is it? Is it the is it the accounting firms and the and the attorneys? Who are you're squeezing out? Or who exactly is pie Are you eating?
• 27:02
  Amanda Li: I think at the end of the day, the industry should be hopefully, right if we all, you know, otherwise are bigger climate problems growing at a rate where there aren't enough bodies to keep up with some of this work that needs to be done, right. And what you see instead is people slow down or don't make the investments that they cook, right people are, are not investing these smaller projects, or making investments at a certain rate that supports the size of their portfolio management team, or the size of the moment, their investment team. And so I think the jobs that we are replacing, in some ways or the job that like we're being struggled to fit to, to to fill, right, we see that, you know, this almost shortage, right. And people that have decades of solar financing experience, there's not many of them, right, a decade ago, Hill's a very nascent industry.
• 27:48
  Amanda Li: And now we're demanding that hundreds, if not 1000s, of financiers have this ability.
• 27:56
  Amanda Li: And so we're creating leverage for a group of people that that needed without having to replace jobs, which is very convenient, right? It's always better to be able to apply software and say, Now you can grow to x, without having to hire the roles that you were struggling to fill, rather than saying you need to fire anybody, right? If it was anyone, it's something that we are very happy to replace, which is that we saw a lot of bespoke build, you know, fun spending anywhere from one to $10 million in bespoke software built in house, because it was so difficult to be making these investments, you will start to hire engineers to be building effectively Banyon. And if you can imagine every single fund and bank building their own platform, that's a terrible use of money, right? And, you know, law of funds aren't great product developers. And so we're happy to be like, hey, a centralized system makes a lot more sense, from a cost perspective and from a compatibility perspective.
• 28:54
  Tim Montague: Definitely. So let's say I'm a Digi financier, I finance community solar. And I'm used to doing, you know, tranches of say 50 or 100 million dollars. What is the what is the process like to onboard a platform like banyan?
• 29:13
  Tim Montague: How long does that take? And when? How quickly can I expect to see some improvement in my workflow operation?
• 29:24
  Amanda Li: Yeah, I think we have with multiple modules across origination, sort of recording compliance and portfolio management, we'd like to say like from origination standpoint, so you know, we can, we can start to count that and the weeks rather than months, the higher number of weeks, but allowing for you to start to understand your checklist and your templates. Same on the recording compliance side, we can take all of your existing obligations and sort of turn them into digital instrument in some ways, understand what's due, and when. And when you submit things, your lender, your financier, that's all incredibly quick. And we love to be able to say, Hey, your finances are busy enough Frank House mentioning that job shortage, everyone's working 100 plus hour weeks. And so we want to make sure we come in and really provide that value very quickly. The stuff that takes a little bit longer and some of that portfolio management, where you're trying to you know, you want to get that portfolio level IRR, or Reno or NYC, those numbers, we need to tie into either accounting systems or bank accounts, and ensure that your forecasting or spreadsheets all tie up correctly to be able to roll it up. And then that can take a little bit of time. And what we then encourage is that if you're a fund that starting out are still small and growing, is that's to answer these questions earlier, it is so much harder to try to implement software, when you have a spaghetti of of systems already, you have hundreds of spreadsheets that you know don't match up with aren't standardized, you have four different important folder structures we come in, we have to help you clean it up before we can implement them implement the software. But if you're just starting now you're just building a fund. And that's many of them now, right? That's exciting to build software from day one. And we're so heartened that this new generation of fund managers who are starting to think digital first, because they don't want to get to a place where a few years down the line. It's a giant mess and Banyans coming in to clean up a mess rather than preemptively prevent one.
• 31:24
  Tim Montague: You've been in business for five years. Now.
• 31:26
  Tim Montague: Tell us a little bit about that journey. How's it going? What's the reception you're getting from the market? And what is it that you need more of?
• 31:34
  Amanda Li: Um, so early days was you know, first few years all about trying to figure out what was going to really be a thing right. You know, I was like, I could go back to generate or McKinsey and to take, take a leap and be a startup founder.
• 31:47
  Amanda Li: You know, some people might call that a little crazy. But you know, every single fund and bank and developer we chat with, we're like, how are you currently doing this? Oh, it's an Excel. Do you like that? Does that work for you? No, wow, that's like 10 out of 10 times every single time. It was this broken system. And so that early days of really talking to hundreds of banks and bonds, and hearing and clear demand, those were the early days of Banyan, and really establishing that this is incredibly necessary, incredibly impactful with those early customers. And today, now we're we're at a series D, we have 50 plus people, and it's all about scale. We're extremely excited to be on podcast like yourselves, because we're trying to spread the Gospel, right?
• 32:28
  Amanda Li: Project finance software was not a industry before, right, they you know, it's not something that some funds even know of right Excel, as all they've known, they've been doing it that way for decades. We're really about educating right now the industry and then quickly, ensuring more adoption. And once that starts to happen, and we should really hopefully see a snowball effect, where a couple years from now, ideally, it becomes preposterous to be starting a fund or, you know, being a fund entering the solar space and not having software the same way. If you were starting a small business today, and you were doing your accounting in a spreadsheet, people would look at you being like, why are you doing that?
• 33:08
  Amanda Li: Why aren't you buying QuickBooks or NetSuite? Right? There's software to help you with that, right? Don't use a spreadsheet, we need to get project biased to that area. And, you know, it's about slowly getting people to understand that there's a better option, and then slowly developing that that is the standard option and to do spreadsheets would be archaic.
• 33:30
  Tim Montague: And what's a reasonable expectation for a successful outcome? Some percent? Like what do you think about what does success look like in five or 10 years?
• 33:41
  Amanda Li: I think it is being the standard there. Right? I the industry needs standards. And you know, it's it could be fine if there's one or two of them, but there needs to be systems to talk to each other. And a vision we see is that a developer is able to communicate to its financiers early in the lifecycle what its asset is and understand whether it is bankable on Banyon be able to the fund is using that to help manage its transaction it then using it during operations. And then the fund is then going to a bank to understand whether it can get back leverage, that bank is bundling a number of those loans to a pension fund to you know, to sell it off on the back end there. The entire lifecycle is managed on the system, because all sense speaks the same language. And it's incredibly fast and liquid and understandable. Right? Any sort of funding bank not insular today can easily be like, Yeah, I can enter in this industry, because there's a way of understanding the risks, that's clear. And I can add in my systems, and be able to look at key projects really easily without having decades of relationships with a certain developer and a trust based way of making that investment. And so in five years, it's you know, it's it's not us, I genuinely wish for for somebody else to be there, right there. This industry needs that standard.
• 34:58
  Amanda Li: And if we are that that would be our wildest dreams, both from a financial impact of our own company, but also the climate impact we can make, because that means that's an effective capital market.
• 35:12
  Tim Montague: Does the does the scale of the platform today give you a a per view into what is going on in the energy transition? Do you see how certain technologies are ebbing and flowing?
• 35:25
  Amanda Li: We are starting to we have had funds and banks ask us can we buy your data because there you know there's Evie investments on them. There's waste investments, right they want. They want to see how those are doing and having those norms, we hope to be able to have more data products as we scale. But we'll need a bit more volume on our platform we can do before we can do that right? We really want to make sure we can anonymize it. And if you know you have only a certain number of industrial waste projects on your platform and user to look at drill down it by geography, it quickly becomes anonymized right. And so hopefully we can get more people on and will soon have a dataset that we can use to share to the industry to help encourage people's understanding of what is low and high risk.
• 36:10
  Amanda Li: And also hopefully to train you know, to your earlier point these the next generation of technology, right we can train an AI algorithm and start to get more than basic analytics, we can have not only IRR what is day but potentially projected IRR of the projects based on past historical performance.
• 36:28
  Tim Montague: Well, in our last few minutes together, Amanda, what else should our listeners know about Banyan Infrastructure I'm, I'm fascinated, you know, to see how this becomes a standard and I wish you all this excess, please check out all of our content at cleanpowerhour.com Give us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. And check out our YouTube channel, please hit that bell, subscribe to the YouTube and reach out to me. I love hearing from my listeners, your ideas for subjects we should cover and guests that we should have. But tell us, what else should our listeners know, Amanda? And how can our listeners find you?
• 37:06
  Amanda Li: Perfect? Well, they feel free to reach out, you know, both on our website, www.banyaninfrastructure.com. Or to me, Amanda@banyaninfrastructure.com I hope I don't regret giving up that email there. But I think I'm the reason why I gave it out is because of the parting notes.
• 37:23
  Amanda Li: To the share to everyone here is that collaboration is super key here to make this transition.
• 37:27
  Amanda Li: We'll need everyone at the table really trying to share insights on what are what should be the standards, right? What are the ways that we can accelerate decision making and assessing risk both for you know technologies like solar still, that still don't have quite a standard, and even more so new technologies that are rising up.
• 37:49
  Amanda Li: And we don't want to be making that standards in isolation, right? It's gonna take everyone coming together. So we encourage that that conversation and we'd love to chat with anyone who is equally excited at trying to figure out that out. And I promise won't try to sell you the platform too hard. Even if you just want to just come and share insights, right, help us build the right tool and reach out, please.
• 38:16
  Tim Montague: Very good. Well, I want to thank Amanda Li, COO and co founder of Banyan Infrastructure for coming on the show. I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Take care.
• 38:27
  Tim Montague: Hey, listeners. This is Tim, I want to give a shout out to all of you. I do this for you twice a week. Thank you for being here. Thank you for giving us your time. I really appreciate you and what you're all about.
• 38:42
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• 39:39
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• 39:51
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• 40:36
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