Latest / Clean Power Hour / Solving NYC's Energy Crisis: 30-Year Battery Tech for Urban Grids

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Solving NYC's Energy Crisis: 30-Year Battery Tech for Urban Grids · Clean Power Hour

• 0:50
  Christian Farivar: Like, why can't we just put really big batteries in New York City, in LA and Chicago and all these big places? And the question was, of course, you can't, because they're not safe, because they cost a lot of money, they cup a lot of land, they can explode.
• 1:01
  Christian Farivar: And then, like, if you use them a lot, they die. And then so I started the journey doing that in 2014 I called the first major integrand in the US unicos. You remember them, right? And there were really cool guys from Germany to open an office in Austin. I said, you know, can we? And then I thought, if I use it the way I wanted to use them in New York, which is to sell a lot of power, I do all this, these things wouldn't last more than a year or two. And I thought, gee, all this money would be in the garbage. So as an entrepreneur looking to take care of this, I realized that I'm running against the wall.
• 1:33
  Christian Farivar: There's no other way but to basically reinvent the wheel to the extent that is needed, and decouple the problems for where they are, and redesign in a way that works, works for New York, works for any load pocket, and then it truly can integrate the ours can integrate load from anywhere it comes, but essentially acts as a power source for war all the way around it, and that's where we need to go today.
• 1:58
  intro: Are you speeding the energy transition here at the Clean Power Hour, our host Tim Montague, bring you the best in solar, batteries and clean technologies every week. Want to go deeper into decarbonization.
• 2:08
  intro: We do too. We're here to help you understand and command the commercial, residential and utility, solar, wind and storage industries. So let's get to it together. We can speed the energy transition.
• 2:25
  Tim Montague: Today on the Clean Power Hour, we're exploring energy storage as a service for some of the toughest markets in the country like New York City, where space safety and regulation make grid resilience a real challenge. My guest today is the founder of Karh energy.
• 2:38
  Tim Montague: Welcome to the show. Christian Farivar,
• 2:44
  Christian Farivar: Hi, Tim.
• 2:44
  Christian Farivar: Thank you so much for having me.
• 2:46
  Christian Farivar: How are you today?
• 2:48
  Tim Montague: Oh, dude, I am awesome. It's great to be alive.
• 2:51
  Tim Montague: I'm just back from Toronto, where I was visiting what I call my AI overlords. It's, it's just a it's a play. They're not at all my overlords. They're my it's a company called WSI that I'm sort of, I'm a certified AI consultant through them. And it was great to visit with Mike and Seamus in the flesh in Toronto, first time in in Toronto, but Christian, tell us a little bit about yourself. You have a really interesting backstory, and you're also living in Canada. So tell us a little bit about your background. Sure.
• 3:26
  Christian Farivar: Thanks. I'm your Montreal in Canada on the French side of the country. My background, I've been in this energy journey for a long time in different capacities. I recently graduated from Harvard University in the field of management, and I teach some courses now at Harvard Alumni entrepreneurs on entrepreneurship. So I'm dealing a lot with innovators, which is really exciting.
• 3:53
  Christian Farivar: I've car which was founded about five years ago, around 2020, just around the time that the FERC ruling came out, was not, was doing, was incorporated. Then it was a no.
• 4:04
  Christian Farivar: We came up with the concept years ago. I came up and it was a research
• 4:12
  Unknown: that I've been working on for a number of years.
• 4:16
  Tim Montague: So when you refer to a FERC, you're referring to 2222
• 4:20
  Christian Farivar: exactly the 20 at FERC, 2020, actually, it's called by the year, and that's the when, when, when during, yeah, it was FERC 2020. Allowed, was initially allowing ders to get on the grid. And that was, to me, it was a sign to start the company then and there, because back in 2014 I had jumped in to do some research for an energy trader, and who, you know, I was very interested to get into energy at that time, electricity, specifically, the excitement had come from, you know, I had a previously successful career in music business, which I, which I retired from, you know, I work with big artists like mon Jovi and Kanye West and all this kind of stuff on shows. But it was great. But I left, I wanted to go back to my other passion, which was, which was engineering and energy, particularly. And I studied, you know, I did the research on history of energy, and then I found out that, you know, it wasn't what it seems.
• 5:16
  Christian Farivar: It was a lot more complex. And so that got me into the energy storage journey. At that time, we knew that getting a very cool, very strong project in New York, or places like that, particularly, I was looking in New York from the beginning.
• 5:31
  Christian Farivar: It's where I've always it's where I've always been passionate, and I've had a lot of experience working with New York and there, but I was in music, so it's someplace that's home to me. I knew that, you know, the research showed that it's just not going to work because it was just the utility market the way the rules and regulation when it was not ready for it. So. So did a lot of baking and developing the ideas and the concepts for the company and with the product and technology and business model would be. But when for 2020, came around, we knew that that's the moment we should launch it, because now it's possible legally to really get on the utility grid. Yeah.
• 6:06
  Tim Montague: So we are at the right time, at the right place, for sure. I do want to dig a little deeper into your background, because it's quite unusual that somebody would come from the pop music industry in New York City over to energy storage and be a founder of quite a technical what is an OEM? You are a manufacturer of energy storage systems. So how exactly do you make that translation?
• 6:39
  Christian Farivar: You know, I'm a, that's a great, that's a great point. So first of all, we're, yeah, it's, I'm glad you brought that up. So in terms of what we're building, it's really, you know, you don't arrive there on day one. It just a whole series of things build up, and you're there. We are building power electronics.
• 6:54
  Christian Farivar: We're building we're designing semiconductor device. We're designing our own thermal technology innovation. We have completely new thermal technology stack. We have completely new HVAC stack. We have redesigned the rack. We have we have literally gone at the cell level. We've designed our own battery management system so we've and our own AI, which is just incredibly good.
• 7:20
  Christian Farivar: In other words, we looked at the entire way that energy storage was from an outsider lens, which I think is really helpful. And that's what I did. And I thought this is a great technology, but nothing about it is working the way I would use it, and and, and I knew where it needed to happen for it to work and for it to work, was that, what is the biggest problem was, you know, I said I knew New York City, right? I had a background in entertainment. It was an accidental background, and I really enjoyed it. Prior to that, I was always interested in engineering. And when I was a teenager, I remember accidentally sitting in the library and reading about, I used to read science magazines, by the way, since I was a kid, so I was a top science student.
• 8:03
  Christian Farivar: And I was also very interested in art, and I studied both of them, left right you know, basically left brain, right brain. But I remember reading about how power production, you know, was the number one source of pollution in the world. And I was right away interested in, like, spending bacterias that you could, like, drop from airplanes that could, like, kill pollution. I thought that would be really cool. It was always about cities. For me. I don't know why, because I was a big city person. And then I thought, well, that might not work. And I thought, you know, one, and I like, maybe it's the regulation side. I remember working for Greenpeace for a year, and that was really depressing, and I thought, that won't work. So I want to do something else that I thought to do environmental law.
• 8:41
  Christian Farivar: Then I didn't work. And then I'm studying history philosophy, and, you know, and history was really where I went back into energy again when I discovered the history of electricity. Why?
• 8:51
  Christian Farivar: For example, co generation didn't take off in the US. I realized that my passion was in energy. After I retired from music, I remember Dick Munson, great historian, read my paper, thought I was really great. And I thought, you know, this is my calling. I went back and studied another couple years of engineering. So, you know, I have, I didn't finish the engineering degree, but I went back at it. So I have a what I call them, what they what they call them, bilingual capability.
• 9:17
  Christian Farivar: I can, I can speak technical ease, yeah. And I can speak business ease, if you will, to say, and I think that's the kind of skill that has helped me build Karh the way we have been, and bringing a really good team.
• 9:32
  Christian Farivar: And when I was working in music, you know, I was putting multi million dollar projects out of thin air and ensuring these are done at a quality that is just absolutely perfect. I was an independent promoter. I was an outsider, and I was managed to work with the biggest of the biggest, the biggest, and they like working with me. And so I thought, I think I brought that capability, which is, I think, you know, just this, you know, ability to bring these complex things, that all these moving parts together that became something that it just became good at, which is now used in Karh. We're bringing so many different kinds of technologies together building a vertically integrated, I would say, sort of a powerhouse technology that that at the core, is built on battery storage, but it's a lot more like a computer, and there's a lot of similarities between computers, by the way, and batteries. And I'll get into that.
• 10:27
  Tim Montague: Yeah, I would love for us to let's do a deep dive into the technology to the extent possible. Okay, like you have arrived at a dis at a realization that we need better batteries that are suited to certain environments and and then May. We can swing out again and talk about the grid and the transition that we're on, this journey to clean the grid. You know, a couple of years ago, I documented large scale storage needs, and apparently we need about six terawatt hours of ESS on the grid to green the grid, and of course, that'll go up as the grid grows, and we are going to triple, or perhaps quintuple the grid. And now we see the AI explosion happening in real time, and prices are going up.
• 11:26
  Tim Montague: The grid is humming and being stressed by the build out, but also by climate change. The important statistic for my listeners on this front is billion dollar storms used to happen every 90 days in the US now they happen every 19 days.
• 11:45
  Tim Montague: So the frequency of storms has gone up by a factor of five, almost 4.7 Okay, that's a lot.
• 11:56
  Tim Montague: So the grid is super challenged, both by itself and by these external forces. But what is car?
• 12:05
  Christian Farivar: Yeah, I mean, before we understand what is car and why it is, I think you brought a very important point.
• 12:10
  Christian Farivar: We need to understand the auspices under which we built I looked at the problems based on what needs to happen. At the core, when you sit around New York City, which I spent a lot of years and time in back and forth, you're sitting in literally the capital of the world. This is where all the businesses, all the industries happening, and you have the most amount of electricity, so excuse me, peak demand is happening there. At the same time you've got grid congestion building out, and you're looking at this last 10 years, and I love you said you worked on this podcast.
• 12:45
  Christian Farivar: You've been following the energy story, history of energy transition for the last 10 years. The this is goes back many years ago, where like and this is not just a New York problem. The way that the power systems are built. You know, any major city you get into New York, LA, Houston, Chicago, you've got transmission coming around, and then you got distribution that it steps it down and brings into the population. These transmission lines are can only take so much.
• 13:12
  Christian Farivar: They're like a highway. You know, once you get to about a few percent, you know, you have to start to have a loss. I think once you get to like 50% the losses like 50% capacity transmission lines such that a few percent, as soon as goes a bit, the curve is even higher.
• 13:29
  Christian Farivar: You can get into like 50% loss.
• 13:29
  Christian Farivar: All that power coming in is just gone. So that is limited. These htvc line that is coming in New York now it's essentially, you know, a DC line, is what I've been hearing, is that it brings back New York to the problem it had literally 20 years ago. And that's hauling it takes for these cycles to occur. Because it's just the world is getting more complex. The way to build these systems is just takes a lot longer the research, the trend. So all this is going happening at the once while. On the other hand, you've got innovation that has made use of electricity for powering buildings, for powering transportation, for powering industries. Suddenly a much more cost effective. Innovators have made these technologies that allows consumer industrial side production of energy that can potentially compete with buying it from grid operators, and yet, then vice versa, they're trying to connect to the grid. So all this is turning the grid as these distributed resources, electric vehicles, buildings, electrified buildings, and then data centers, which are, what I these are, all have a certain similarity. They call high load technologies. In other words, they can suddenly increase the load by a lot in a very split second, and then change, you know, several, several trucks from, you know, a company coming, arriving in a particular corner in New York, could suddenly require several megawatts of power in just a few minutes, and like the grid is just not designed for that. So what utilities and power producers have been doing is they've been adding what's called firming power capacity around that, which is just having a lot of standby power to watch out for these groovy changes. So all this is to say that you it has been well known that, and I think there was actually a great paper by Judge Tommy about, you know, the story how the US system works is that the US government administration has always been focused on getting rid of, like, gross misconstituties, you know. And so it was known that is important to have a lot of power mix, a lot of different dynamism to just, you know, put that away as being a problem space. So we're getting in this place where we have lots of different power power systems. Like you said, there is inverter based, there's gas, there's nuclear, and there's competition, different. The problem is, though, that at the end of the day, they all have to come to the load pockets. You know, load pockets are places where the load is just really intense, really, really, you. There's a lot of layers of power needs, power services need, and so there's no solution to that you can have. And battery storage, by the way, is, you know, has been thought to be this great, you know, Shape Shifter. It could really help do a lot of things for different reasons and different things and and one of them would be to, you know, time shift, as you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of cases.
• 17:04
  Christian Farivar: But bottom line is that for this purpose, in order to look at low pockets and how to relieve the low pockets, that they did, the long standing wisdom has been, well, you know, the easiest thing would be just the power plants in big cities. And that's really, if you had a power big power plant in middle of New York or LA or Houston, you don't have the transmission problems, say, the electricity we achieve.
• 17:23
  Christian Farivar: The problem is that you can't build power problem is, like, you can't build power plants in New York or LA, it's just not going to happen. The space, the pollution.
• 17:29
  Tim Montague: So, yeah, I think there's a there's but, but New York. I mean, in New York's case, right, there are power plants right around New York, like on new on Long Island, right? But, but you to your point about load pockets aren't distributed generation resources. An answer to load pockets.
• 17:53
  Christian Farivar: So the short answer is no and but the long answer is yes and no. And I'll tell you what that means is that when you are in this exactly so the load, the grid, the power grid as a whole, what they call the biggest, World's Biggest machine. And if you listen to Jim Rob podcast on this about five years ago, fantastic conversation. He did was that the power grid has always been based on a known system. You've got the Central's utility power production sources. You know, they get interconnection. You know who they are. You know what the load is. And you know, electricity is produced and used almost instantaneously. You know the idea of, like, storing it a little bit, you know, like you do with grain or wood or other commodities, brand new, it's coming in, but it's still very tiny. Then you've got this topology, which we're moving to, in which power production sources can come from many little places. Many of them are not even big enough to have a wholesale permit, right? They can't, they can't be so you're going from a known state to an unknown state. So if you have a small amount of DRS, you know, and a few resources, that's okay. But again, these Dr they are not able to get on the grid fast enough. If they get on there, they still need to put a lot of costs and other expenses into there, and then at the end of the day, you're still need to get on the Transmission Line and bring it to the to the market.
• 19:12
  Christian Farivar: If you look at it right now, they're putting all this wind they want to put near New York.
• 19:17
  Christian Farivar: How are you going to get that into the New York City, you know? And how are you going to get that into New York City in a time where it's needed the most, vice versa. So the big answer, the short obviously, answers to have really big batteries. It's just that that's not possible to do. But we said, why not? And that's what we built Karh like, why can't we just put really big batteries in New York City, in LA and Chicago and all these big places? And the question was, of course, you can't, because they're not safe, because they cost a lot of money, take up a lot of land, they can explode.
• 19:43
  Christian Farivar: And then, like, if you use them a lot, they die. And then so I started the journey doing that in 2014 I called the first major integrand in the US unicos. You remember them, right? And there were really cool guys from Germany to open an office in Austin. I said, you know, can we? And then I thought, if I use it the way I wanted to use them in New York, which is to sell a lot of power do all this, these things wouldn't last more than a year or two. And I thought, gee, all this money would be in the garbage. So as an entrepreneur looking to take care of this, I realized that I'm running against the wall. There's no other way but to basically reinvent the wheel to the extent that is needed, and decouple the problems for where they are and redesign in a way that works.
• 20:26
  Christian Farivar: Works for New York, works for any load pocket, and then it truly can integrate Drs. Can integrate load from anywhere it comes, but essentially acts as a power source for war all the way around it, and that's where we need to go today.
• 20:40
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• 21:48
  Christian Farivar: I mean, just, you know, as I said, I don't want to, you know, and I think Steve Jobs did this great job.
• 21:52
  Christian Farivar: Steve didn't want to talk about people who are serious or not. I said, all these great companies are doing great things. It's just not what we're doing. You know, there is a lot of companies working on different kinds of power storage. There's people saying that the big solution will come from changing the cell technology. And, you know, I think building a new cell technology is like developing a new drug. There's only handful of drug companies that can manufacture it's a large state. And same thing happens with batteries. There's a lot of companies making, you know, cool integration with existing technologies and reorganizing in a way that is good, but skilling them in a large scales, in a large scale, and making them last a long time, such that it makes alpha and makes worth doing and you can run it. No one has been able to accomplish that in a big way.
• 22:35
  Christian Farivar: There is really, you know, there are, there are integrators in New York right now who have hundreds of millions of dollars in cash that are trying to build these sites in New York. They can't find land. They can't find and the economics doesn't work, the even economics of putting, you know, any of these batteries just doesn't work. Because you can run them, let's say, one cycle a day, you know, and then, but that's not what the grid, you know. That's not the way to make good money off of them. And then you have to run them one cycle a day. Then they want to make you know, the batteries are only were, like, 80% I mean, it's just this. The economic doesn't build up our economic, economy right now is, like, we're able to run at a level of, let's say, 20 megawatt, you know, module, if to say, and these are, like, sort of like I said, that's the size we're going for. And larger than that, we can generate like anyone from seven to $8 million a year, net.
• 23:27
  Christian Farivar: And that is unseen numbers. You know, we're looking at unit economics of like around 45 $50 a megawatt hour. And that is like getting into, you know, cost turnout and cost that is, like competitive with generating hydroelectric. So these unit economic is only possible when you completely reimagine the, you know, the battery. And I said, I love, you know, brought that metaphor is that the battery, if it was, if you think about is a lot like a computer, because computers, you know, are adaptive machine. You know, they take electrons, they do different things with them. But guess what? Batteries are also playing with electrons, and it's just a very larger amount. And so if you make, if you think about the battery like that, it kind of frees your brain like, you know, wow, that's true. If the battery can be like a machine, what can I do for this machine to run really well?
• 24:15
  Christian Farivar: Well, you need to make sure, if it runs hot, there's no problems, right? You need to make sure that the HVAC, the thermal management, is really well. You need to make sure that designed to be incredibly clean and efficient, and especially if we're running it to make money from it, which was we're focused on doing, then you want this to generate as much efficiency as possible, which is not the kind of system you can buy in the market, and it's certainly not, not at levels that are efficient for cost, life, repair. You know, you know, we're going to world where, like we're looking, have to look at about our supply chain, you know, where's the supply chain coming from? You know, what happens if things go wrong? All that becomes an issue you need to solve as an entrepreneur when you're trying to build
• 24:56
  Tim Montague: so Systems major you you put a lot of things on the table here. So we need to unpack this a little bit more methodically. I think you're talking about a 20 megawatt building block. So, so, so you're building, you're designing and manufacturing a battery. And then planning to deploy it. You're not just a battery maker. You're actually a developer that wants to be an asset owner, I believe. Is that right?
• 25:38
  Christian Farivar: I mean, yeah, where we see the need is, is to sell the electricity, not not this is there's nobody needs more machines. And if they do, it wouldn't be worth it for us to sell it. I feel like, if you look at, you know, SpaceX, you know, you can't buy a rocket from them, but that's not the where the problem is. The problem is you need to get satellites in space. So sure, they never use of a rocket. And so we've made a battery that lasts a long time. If the you know they our asset life is a possibly. Right now we're looking about 30 year asset life at the very least. I think it's gonna and what is the,
• 26:13
  Tim Montague: what is the core technology that you're working on? Lithium iron, plastic
• 26:17
  Christian Farivar: core technology, I could talk about.
• 26:19
  Christian Farivar: But there are, there are three levels of technology that come together. One is the application level. One is that the system level one is the infrastructure level. They're kind of like three groupings, if you were to say and so that kind of makes it a vertical, integrated, vertical, vertical, integrated stack. The at the core. We're using regular chemistry,
• 26:38
  Tim Montague: you know, cell chemistry, lithium iron phosphate.
• 26:42
  Christian Farivar: Lithium ion batteries are of different kinds. Or, like you said, like lithium ion, we're also open to other technologies that they come we're essentially a chemistry agnostic
• 26:51
  Unknown: system. So that's how the system's designed.
• 26:53
  Christian Farivar: Okay, which is, which is, which is a, which is a good placing starting point to look at how it's unique. In other words, we looked at, you know, how battery systems work.
• 27:01
  Christian Farivar: You don't want to be stuck with a single, you know, self provider. And if you're worried, look at the airline industry.
• 27:07
  Christian Farivar: Why I never, you know you want to get into because if you want to start an airline, you have Airbus or Boeing, and I don't want to be in a position where we start to scale up a company and something happens, and then we can't get our equipment, you know, we can't get ourselves. So we decouple that. So we're cell agnostic. We're chemistry agnostic technology at the core, that's, that's the first layer,
• 27:29
  Tim Montague: and then, but you're building, let's just say you're building a 20 megawatt container, and then putting how many of these containers like, what's, what's your vision?
• 27:41
  Tim Montague: What's your vision for, for New York City, you're very focused on New York City. Initially, I love New York, and on some level, I can appreciate that, but on some level, I go, Well, why go to the most difficult place to install a really big battery?
• 27:57
  Christian Farivar: I love that question. And there's also, there's two reasons for that.
• 27:58
  Christian Farivar: First of all, I didn't even think about it. It's just like, I was like, New York, you know, because it's the, it's the city I know the best. You know, I used to work in as a museum culture, and I was always active there. It's just where my connections came, like, I get invited where it was during the pandemic by a friend who I knew from the data, data science world. He said, I'm starting an excited when I come in and join and I was like, Sure, but the you know, if you make it New York, you can make it anywhere.
• 28:26
  Christian Farivar: You know, that's for Frank Sinatra said, and it's true, it's really the center of the universe. But more than that, and I didn't realize it until later, it's like the problems in New York are at so many levels more sophisticated, and once you learn how to do it, there you you know, for us, the learning experience has been really helpful, because it helped us build technologies and design things in a way that is so much safer, so much better, that now we feel like then taking it elsewhere would be a lot easier.
• 28:52
  Christian Farivar: In other words, the problem is you're looking at so many levels of needs, of you know you need to provide, you know, you look at the layers of problem in New York, when it comes to the low pocket, you have low problems, you have frequency problems, you have at a peak demand problems.
• 29:12
  Christian Farivar: Then you've got integration with all these DRS coming around at the distribution level. You know, they have, you have now a very small level of, you know, consumer level. Dr, but imagine when that goes up, the distribution grids is not prepared for it, and a lot of people don't like to put smart meters from Con Ed or other big utilities on the property, because that's kind of the off Grider mentality. So many utilities are in the dark about like, what's going on at the topology of these, these properties, that they're just they're not fully aware so the compound of problem is really the kind of problem that excited me. I thought that's great, because I'm thinking exactly about these things. I'm thinking about, like, why can't I make a battery? I always start from the beginning. I said, I want to build a battery that does all of these things. So it has to work all the time. Has to work really robustly. So we are going to solve like, we're running our AI right now. We just ran our test we ran, you know, we're doing 12x in profitability and revenue by literally bringing the price down. And we're making 12x profit than any existing AI that we've looked at. It's crazy.
• 30:13
  Christian Farivar: Like, the numbers are staggering. So really proud of that.
• 30:19
  Tim Montague: Well, that's awesome and but, like, I really think we have to be focused on the real world and solving real world challenges. And I get it that you're passionate for New York City, and so let's say you deploy 100 megawatt hour battery in a specific geography in New York City, like, that's a good that's a big battery in America today would be 100 megawatt hour. And you do see 100 megawatt hour projects coming to the surface. Some of them are heat batteries, some of them are gravity batteries, some of them are lithium ion batteries.
• 31:00
  Tim Montague: Batteries are good. It's a two way device, right? It absorbs energy and it deploys energy instantaneously, in many cases, in the case of batteries, what, what is, then? What like, what is you? What are you achieving by attacking a load pocket?
• 31:19
  Christian Farivar: Yeah, very good question. So first of all, I think you know, our test projects is going to be about 90 megawatt hour, but we're going to go for a lot larger and faster modular we have a we have a way to modularly interconnect at a faster rate, which we'll get into another time if you're interested. So what means when we put one of our power stations in a place? Let's say, in new in Brooklyn or Manhattan, or anywhere where we get to work with the the land the land operators, is that the scale, it has to be quite higher. So we know we're looking at, you know, 20 megawatt, 90 megawatt hour to start, but it will get really quickly into something like, you know, 350, megawatt hour or more. And so what that does at that level is that now suddenly we're able to bring in transmission. You're able to take care of the transmission constraint in a different way.
• 32:15
  Christian Farivar: You know, there are a lot of lower cost, you know, inverter based could be gastric mini glasses. You know, I don't think battery is a clean technology. I think it's like, you know, for us, because you can't really choose where the electrons come from which but ends up being always cheaper from inverter based technically. But you're bringing that power into the market during a time where it's not, where it's not as as the grid congestion is not there. So that's one opportunity, right away, bringing to the distribution area where you're in, because when you're when you're in a place in any geography, you're on, in the low pocket, you're essentially, you're closest to the distribution place where you're at, right? So that's your network. That's where you have to go. You can't, you know, intra, intra, intra, network trading isn't really out there yet, right? So you have to take it. Let's say you're Farragut.
• 33:01
  Christian Farivar: Let's say Farragut substation in Brooklyn, great place. So you're able to now bring lower cost electricity. You've got utility nearby. You've got other off takers. There's all kinds of if you look at some of the other developers in the market, there are, there are a lot of companies right there who are really excited about having, like, off peak power if they could. So if you're able to work with them, you can provide them off big power that reduces cost to everybody. Then you've got consumers even around you, who may have, you know, power nearby, they might have a small bit of power, but they don't have a lot, and you can aggregate for them. In our case, we also have EV charging stations planned in our system.
• 33:39
  Christian Farivar: Our battery charger doubles as a as an EV charging charger, and also charges batteries like an extremely, ultra fast charging system. So we can provide, we can provide low cost, ultra fast charge to EVs, particularly trucks who have larger needs. So suddenly you're starting to make a difference. You know, you can do frequency regulation. You can do, you know, you're bringing cheap power into the market. And you now you're the transmission constraint is no longer the big problem. And if you skip once, we can scale these up in a very large scale, and I'm talking like hundreds of megawatts near multiple substations, then suddenly the transmission hurdle does not become as big an issue as it was that that that we know that we need to wait a long time for the next transmission upgrade to come, and again, we'll bring back the price for what it was 1020, years ago, but now you have accessibility of power. It's lower cost. You have now all kinds of people, let's say Dr can integrate with it.
• 34:33
  Christian Farivar: The more and bigger issue now is that if you're going to have electrical buildings, if you're going to have agent like, for example, Manhattan, you need to bring edge AI servers into Manhattan if you want to do if you want to be competitive. I'm sure they're doing it. But those data servers suddenly go over, like, they suddenly need, like, 40 megawatts, and the next second they don't, like, who knows who's using it, right?
• 34:52
  Christian Farivar: Like, suddenly one person might be crunching a lot of data. It might, it might. So you need to have capacity close to the use and that means that those, those power plants I talked about earlier that are doing all that capacity. A lot of those are gas field power plants. They're expensive. They should be doing other things. You know, you could be using as a battery, as a capacity resource at a much lower cost fatigue. In our case, as I mentioned throughout much our LCOE, LCOS, then that suddenly brings the cost of capacity down. Guess what? That does that that 20% 40% you know, 20, excuse me, 24% price increase. Your increase you're seeing on on rate payers because of all the, you know, capacity fees from data servers and other but that's going to come down if New York wants to see rapid building electrification. That means suddenly, these gigantic buildings at 4pm at 40 stories high, you're going to have 10s of megawatt of power in one second. Wires. It would explode if you don't have a very, very rapid resource nearby that can handle, and that's very expensive to do, unless you find unit economics to make it work, and it has to be close by. So that's what we're doing. Cool.
• 35:53
  Tim Montague: So that's a great vision. I love it. What's the status of the company? When are you going to actually deploy technology? Do you think so?
• 36:02
  Christian Farivar: We're on a roadmap to, you know, we're currently starting our pre, pre seed round. We're, we're actually have a few investors that have already, you know, spoken to us and said they want to help us close around. And then we're going to plan to get into our first test location.
• 36:21
  Christian Farivar: And our focus, as always was in New York by 2027 that's always been our roadmap, and then we will after that. We look to scale up rapidly and through the next three years, and when you Investment Partners and scale that up, but we want to test that. We obviously our focus right now is to get funded in New York Fire Department and your bill. Department the new Mayor's office, and make sure that they feel extremely comfortable and they see that I've already ran this by really great fire specialists and code code consultants. So we know that this is really where things need to go. But I'm
• 36:57
  Unknown: excited to get that and after that we can scale up.
• 37:01
  Tim Montague: And can you talk about the seed round at all like, how much are you trying to raise for the seed round?
• 37:06
  Christian Farivar: Yeah, so our seed round is going to be around 100 million.
• 37:10
  Unknown: The pre seed rounds look substantially smaller, but it's a small round. We're raising right now about a million and a half, which, as I said, I was already kind of called for, which is going to get us to finish a lot of the hardware design that we wanted to certify and put into the main system. And after that, we're going to build out the production line and
• 37:30
  Christian Farivar: put the first site into into the city. And yes, our look, and we are on the lookout. We're already going to we're already looking at Chicago. We're looking at Boston. I've already started to look in LA, but we need to be focused on where we know we make, the big, biggest difference New York State, and New York City has always been very interested in batteries. We have people who worked with Con Ed, who are on our advisory team. You know, there are a lot of great, great people who've been extremely helpful, who've been coming in and helping us.
• 37:55
  Christian Farivar: So this is, this is a great place to launch, and from there we can expand once, once we see but we need to focus right now on this, this Launchpad,
• 38:05
  Tim Montague: I think there are a couple of bottlenecks for technology companies. There's people. You need more smart people. People are a limiting factor, and you need connections and funding, right money, okay, and and then you need some some good luck and timing of those three things, I guess, what do you see as the greatest challenge for Karh at this stage?
• 38:42
  Christian Farivar: If anything, it would be the money. But I think we're okay now in that level. I don't know where the seed round, you know, that will always be something that I want to close. But again, we've already started having an early conversation. You know, the seed investors I spoke with five years ago, four years ago, when we were on the Cornell accelerator, and, you know, I've been in contact with them, they just said, you know, once you have the hardware ready, we're looking, look at it. Un economics works, you know. So I think we're in a really good position. I think there's always challenges. We're really lucky.
• 39:11
  Christian Farivar: I was lucky from the day one with people. This is kind of why I believe in Occam razor, you know, like the fastest, slowest answer is always a true one.
• 39:21
  Christian Farivar: When I started on the journey in 2014 2015 I had some of the best, you know, scientists helping me run the beginning. I think I mentioned some of them to you. And then I spoke with, you know, heads of major, major government organizations who, right away gave me the data. I mean, it was just like, wow, this is amazing. What's going on here? And then all the top integrators. And then when we start to build a team, right now we have an amazing team. We have engineers who used to work at FERC and, you know, Tennessee, you know Valley Authority on our team. We have literally, like wizards designing our drive. I mean, I'm shocked. We have when our engineering, when we decided to build the drive, the our battery charger, which is a 1500 volt DC, ultra fast charging at like 98% efficiency. And it's we got to design that from, from, from when we proved the research to to actual proto almost finishing simulation. This has been, it's been done in six weeks. I'm just shocked, like we're at this place where we have integrating knowledge among the team in such a way that it's just incredible. We have, we have just a fantastic team. Of course, you met my, my co founder, Daniel Bedard. This guy is a wizard. I mean, he's, you know, four years he's been working on renewable systems and all kinds. He calls himself a physical engineer, but he's just one of the only, you know, people in the world who, who knows kind of like everything there's. He's like the baba for energy stories. You know, he knows all the different things about the technology as a mechanical expert. So, yeah, in that sense, you know, we had, you know, someone who was a under, you know, who helped run things that the brook Navy art, who became an advisor to the company early, early on. So we're, like, really lucky getting involved in a very good access to the real estate, you know, market to the New York understanding how that works.
• 40:59
  Christian Farivar: And we already spoke with the EDC. I had a first conversation with them. They're amazing people. So in terms of the connections, we're just been really lucky, and I hope that luck continues, you know, and in terms of the team that I think the team has been just incredible. I mean, again, it's been extremely lucky to have that our data, data science team came in together. We have, you know, we built the AI stack also in just a couple of months from the from the concept to development. So I'm really excited about that. So, yeah, the funding has always been, is, was always the issue, and that that now is also being resolved.
• 41:36
  Christian Farivar: And I think the reason as a result, because we just designed a lot of stuff that we can show to investors. They can. See that? Wow. Okay, this is some pretty serious stuff. So it also came with organically Cool.
• 41:49
  Tim Montague: Well, if you're listening to this and you want to invest in next generation energy storage technology, reach out to Christian or myself. Hey guys, are you a residential solar installer doing light commercial but wanting to scale into large C&I solar. I'm Tim Montague. I've developed over 150 megawatts of commercial solar, and I've solved the problem that you're having you don't know what tools and technologies you need in order to successfully close 100 KW to megawatt scale projects. I've developed a commercial solar accelerator to help installers exactly like you. Just go to clean power hour.com click on strategy and book a call today.
• 42:34
  Tim Montague: It's totally free with no obligation. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate you listening to the pod, and I'm Tim Montague, let's grow solar and storage. Go to clean power hour and click strategy today. Thanks so much. And Christian, where can our listeners find you?
• 42:54
  Christian Farivar: I'm always available on LinkedIn, of course. Christian Farivar, Karh, that energy is the website. The company is called Karh, but our URL is k, A, R, H, dot energy, I'd love to chat with you, and if we don't end up working together on energy, we'd love to talk about innovation and complexity and crazy technology.
• 43:10
  Christian Farivar: That's really my my sweet spot.
• 43:15
  Christian Farivar: I'm a hurt I'm a hipster nerd, if you will. Because he said I have the music background.
• 43:21
  Tim Montague: I love it. Well, check out all of our content at clean power hour.com I would love it if you're on a journey into large C&I and battery storage, if you would book a strategy call with me. Just go to the strategy tab at clean power hour.com and meet me at a conference. I go to many of the regional re pluses. I'll be at inner solar San Diego at the beginning of 2026 and with that, I'll say, let's grow solar and storage. I want to thank Christian, far of our for coming on the show. Thanks so much, Christian.
• 43:52
  Christian Farivar: Thank you so much for having me. Tim. It's been a pleasure. Look forward to stay in touch.
• 43:56
  Tim Montague: Let's grow solar and storage. I'm Tim Montague.
• 43:58
  Tim Montague: Tim.