Episode 127: Your House as a Power Plant with Enphase's Marco Krapels

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head on. I'm Molly Wood.

This week's conversation is bringing all of our recent threads together. It's kind of the holy grail of, oh, hey, you know what? There's actually tons of clean energy out there that we can generate, store and distribute. And in fact, as we electrify, as we deploy batteries and solar and connect our electric cars to the grid, we can totally meet low demand, data centers and all, without gas plants and nuclear power plants. And you and me at home, we can get paid for contributing to the grid instead of paying through the nose.

I know, right? What a world. Let's take a walk through fantasy land.

Marco Krapels: I am, uh, Marco Krapels. I'm the Senior Vice President and CMO of Enphase Energy, and I'm also responsible for global energy markets, which is, uh, enabling our, uh, millions of customers to participate in virtual power plants and get paid.

Molly Wood: I, so I'm so excited to have this conversation with you because I've been talking about virtual power plants and kind of smarter energy aggregation for a long time.

Talk to me about Enphase, but you know, longtime listeners will know, Enphase was on the show already talking about the consumer side of the house. Um, so give us a little bit of like how this differs.

Marco Krapels: Yeah. So basically, you know, I think most people know Enphase because of our micro-inverter technology that sits behind solar panels and millions of them.

As a matter of fact, you know, we're celebrating our 20 year anniversary, uh, this quarter. I'm wearing the t-shirt right now.

Molly Wood: Nice.

Marco Krapels: And um. Yeah, it's pretty cool actually nice material too. Very organic cotton, you know.

And, um, and so, you know, most of our, uh, people and people in the industry know us as a micro inverter company that sits behind solar panels. And we were exactly that company until about five years ago.

And then we embarked on being a, from being a single product company to a systems company, and we added the battery. Uh, we are adding, uh, this year the bidirectional EV charger, which is super exciting. It's vehicle to home, vehicle to grid and you can dispatch, get paid.

So, um, and then all of that is bundled together, uh, through a really good software platform and interacts with our gateway and that can interact with utilities that can access the bundled flexible capacity that sits behind the meter and we can dispatch capacity. Um, and that really could move the needle in a significant way, particularly in jurisdictions where there are, you know, capacity constraints, where large loads like data centers need to be connected and people are scrambling to figure out how do we meet these capacity requirements.

And we've realized that, you know, we have millions of existing customers in the United States, several million alone, that, you know, it could actually become active participants in this democratizing energy economy that is scrambling for capacity, really, like utilities. That's not a single utility you talk to, that's not looking for, uh, capacity.

And our customers can participate, uh, in that. And, and get paid for allowing a utility to access the capacity that sits in the home behind the meter and dispatch capacity when the grid needs it most.

So that's really what we've evolved into. You know, we went from a single products only, you know, focused on solar only company to a system company, which is a smart system that can provide value to the grid and help utilities in the challenges that they're facing.

Molly Wood: I mean, I, this has been a, a huge theme in every conversation about energy and all the shows that I've been doing lately. Also, this sort of question of how to meet rising load demand, ideally without building a bunch of new infrastructure, particularly if that infrastructure is fossil fuels.

Marco Krapels: That's right. That's right.

Molly Wood: And it sounds like what you know, like, and I think that the evolution of Enphase is so interesting and the evol, evolution of batteries in general, it's like, oh, okay, well it can store energy and so that's great when the sun's not shining.

Then it's like, well, it can soar energy. That's great when the sun's not shining. But also it could give back to the grid a little bit.

And then now you're talking about this sort of third phase, which is like, oh, well if a whole bunch of batteries are storing energy, then all of a sudden they become an asset, a layer…

Marco Krapels: Exactly.

Molly Wood: Of energy infrastructure that we hadn't really like talked about how new this development is because it feels like it's really taken up speed quickly.

Marco Krapels: Yeah, it is. And by necessity, right, I mean you, you saw, you see the news everywhere. You know, we're United States is leading the AI revolution, but where's the energy coming from? Actually, Jensen Huang, you know Jensen at Nvidia always talks about the five-layer AI cake.

And you know what the first layer is of this five-layer cake? Energy. That's what he's most concerned about. Where is the energy gonna come from? Where is the capacity gonna come from?

And you know, you also hear a lot of news about, oh, we're behind China. You know, China's deployed hundreds of gigawatts, and we're just at a fraction of it.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Marco Krapels: Well, guess what? You know, if you want to solve this problem with only centralized fossil fuel generation. Good luck getting a Neil Gas power plant permitted up and running in the next two years. Good luck getting a nuclear power plant permanent up and running in the next two years.

And why do I say the next two years? Is this whole AI war, which is what it is, this battle between the United States and China is gonna be determined in the next three years.

Molly Wood: Hmm.

Marco Krapels: It's not gonna be decades. And so in order for the United States not to skip one beat, we cannot wait for fossil fuel power plants to be permitted and to be operational.

Try to buy a gas turbine right now at GE. You can't get one. You're gonna be in the back of the line, try to buy one at Siemens, you're gonna be in the back of the line and then try to get all of that developed and permanent.

So what we're basically saying, and I'm seeing this, we're having conversations with the big data center guys. We're having conversations with utilities at CEO level. And we're actually deploying some of this, and I'll talk about that in a second. This is not pie in the sky. Does it work? It works 'cause we're doing that.

Um, but what I'm seeing is, is, is it really the, the ones that are struggling with this, which is both the data center guys, the utilities, they’re are scrambling. How do I connect these large loads? Where do I get the capacity from? Everyone started to look at, okay, well we have millions of interconnection points already approved, permitted, called homes.

There are 86 million homes with a roof in the United States, and guess what? We've only covered 7 million of them with solar. That means there is 81 million homes left to go. To solve this problem, you need to put solar and a 10 kilowatt battery on less than 10 million homes. New homes. Problem solved. Problem solved.

Molly Wood: Wow.

Marco Krapels: You know, you can unleash…

Molly Wood: Energy generation. Problem solved. You're saying?

Marco Krapels: You can unleash hundreds of gigawatts of capacity. And even if you factor in, you know, the capacity factor for solar, which is not like a nuclear power plant because the sun doesn't shine the entire day. But even if you factor that into the equation, you know, you only need 10 million homes to solve this problem in the next two to three years.

And um, and if you want that to be firm capacity at battery storage, then it operates like a nuclear power plant, solar during the night. Battery can help you dispatch at night and you've got more firm capacity and we can solve this. This problem is entirely solvable.

And was really interesting. The other day I was listening to a, a podcast with, uh, Chamath and you know, he mentioned this…

Molly Wood: Chamath. We should say, Chamath Palihapitiya, we should say the investor for people who don't know.

Marco Krapels: Yes, exactly. Who's, you know, pretty far on the right side. And you know, and this is not a partisan thing. This is like, we gotta come together. As a community, in the United States, we gotta come together and solve the energy problem and the energy problem can be solved. We just gotta put solar and batteries on interconnection points that are already, there are cooled homes. Give the homeowner an incentive to do that. Right.

And um, and, and I think, you know, if you're a big data center developer and you're spending $500 billion on a single project in Texas to add solar and battery stores to a few million homes, it doesn't really move the needle of the overall cost. And so I think, you know, there's an opportunity here for utilities, regulators like the PUC, the energy commissions, the utilities, the OEMs like ourselves to come together and solve this problem. Otherwise, these data centers cannot be and will not be interconnected.

Now, is this pie in the sky? Has it happened before? Who's already doing this? Well, the good news is it already works. So there's a very progressive utility in Vermont called Green Mountain Power.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Marco Krapels: Run by Mari McClure. She's amazing. She’s got a great team there. Good people. I've been there for Vermont. Beautiful. So it's a nice place to travel to.

And they already have embraced, and they started this 10 years ago, to build a very sizable virtual power plant using distributed storage capacity as an alternative to building a massive gas power plant.

This has gone through their regulators, the public utility commission. There are filings for that. There's a lot we can learn from what Green Mountain Power has done and is doing successfully to not only, uh, have an alternative to a fossil fuel power plant, but to actually improve the quality of service, right?

Because these batteries have localized value, right? It can alleviate constraints in the distribution network, right? Or it can alleviate constraints where otherwise there would be problems with substations that cannot handle certain swings in loads or capacity. Uh, like when everyone plugs in their EV charger.

And so, uh, we have, um, proof of concept of these virtual power plants at some scale already working for a utility that helps them to manage loads in the United, in the United Kingdom as well. Uh, Octopus Energy, one of the most progressive utilities in the world. Octopus, uh, and we're a proud partner of theirs, is, you know, embracing very significant, distributed, aggregated, flexible capacity to help manage those load requirements and also trade those assets in front of the meter in energy markets.

And it's not just limited to, you know, a battery. Soon, we'll add the bidirectional EV charger that then pulls in what is possibly the largest capacity, um, you know, provider, meaning the car battery, which is seven x the value of a home battery.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Marco Krapels: And we pulled that into the equation. So, you know, this challenge that we're facing is actually an opportunity to deploy a lot more distributed, flexible capacity that solves two problems. Localized issues that utilities are facing. Um, and, uh, and also providing potentially remote capacity credits for data centers that are seeking and figure out ways about, you know, bring your own own energy, you know, B-Y-E. Yeah. Uh, but this is one way of solving that problem. And also get communities involved.

You know, you don't, you know, you have a lot of, uh, NIMBYism going on around data centers. You know, you know, do they really provide a lot of jobs? Wait a minute, my cost of water is going up. My cost of energy is going up. Well get the community to participate in the solution and make sure they get paid for it.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Marco: Right. So this is gonna tick a lot of boxes and we're starting to see, uh, the first progress there.

Molly Wood: I, I wanna ask about every single piece of that. I'm gonna start with the, I'm gonna start with the Enphase role, and then I, I, let's go through sort of each constituency here and how we kind of, you know, get them to the table and bring them along.

But what is, talk to me about the evolution of your company and the, the solution that, that you are building that is, you know, what is your part of this. Like, talk about how the VPP works, the software control for people who aren't familiar with that.

Marco: Sure, sure. So basically what Enphase, uh, has done is we've created a number of products, you know, starting with the micro inverter and then the battery, uh, which is, uh, right now, uh, 10 kilowatt hour battery, um, that can be strained.

So we can add multiple batteries together to add to the capacity, which is also an opportunity by the way. We can go to existing sites, add more batteries, if that's so desired. Uh, but basically we have the microverter for the solar, which is controllable. Um, we have the battery, which controllable, um, and then we have an EV charger, soon bidirectional EV charger. And you bundle all of that together.

Molly Wood: We're gonna come back to that, by the way. 'cause everybody listening already knows that that is my obsession.

Marco Krapels: Yes. It's super excited. You know? Well if you, if you're driving an electric car, why not have to make money for you? Right.

Molly Wood: Well, and also why buy a battery for my house when there's a battery sitting in my driveway? This has been my, like…

Marco: Yeah,

Molly Wood: It's just as, as a northern plains, you know, multi-gen farmer. I'm like, this makes no sense. It's duplicative.

Marco Krapels: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you may want both, but because maybe a small battery at the house, 'cause your car is not always there.

Molly Wood: Sure.

Marco Krapels: But you know, the point is like the, the car will have a, a, a very big role on this and we, we'll get into that in a second.

But basically what I'm saying is we have all these distributed, flexible assets sitting behind the meter.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Marco Krapels: Right. That we, that could be dumb, but we turn 'em into smart assets. So, you know what, what we do with the Enphase software is we make those assets work for you to basically lower the marginal cost of kilowatt hour of electricity for you.

So, you know, you use, basically what we say is like, you use what you need and you sell what you don't need. Right. And so, and, and that's where we're at right now. So the, so that system, uh, is controlled by the Enphase software that has an API. The API allows utilities, sometimes directly, sometimes through a DERMS provider like, um, you know, Energy Hub, Virtual Peaker, you know, there are these providers that contract with utilities to aggregate that capacity that sits behind the meter. And we API integrate into those. We already have 55 of those partnerships.

And so we have hundreds of megawatt dollars that are enrolled in those partnerships, where homeowners are making money by having their systems be integrated through our API into a VPP, where the utility from time to time wants to access the capacity that sits behind the meter in your home and uses it to balance the grid, solve their problems, and you get paid for that. And you know, that depends. It could be on a per kilowatt basis, sometimes it's a fixed amount per month.

But what, and what we're seeing, and this is really interesting, Molly, is that we're seeing those programs accelerate. They're popping up everywhere. Right? And so we're scrambling and you know, we're hiring people and we're working as hard as we can to make sure that, you know, we have APIs integrated with all of those programs around the country so that our thousands of installers who sell our product to millions of homeowners have another unit economic value to offer to the homeowner. You know?

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Marco Krapels: Why do I get Enphase? Well, you can save money, but also you can get paid and here's how it works. And so that's to me, you know, really exciting because we, we used to be kind of a, a dumb industry to, to be honest with you, I've been at this for a long time, you know, previously at Solar City and, and also at Tesla and, and an Enphase for the last five years.

But we used to be kind of a dumb industry. We were solar only and then we're fighting with utility who didn't want all the solar energy in the middle of the day because it just added to the problem of the duck curve. You know, there was more energy that they didn't know what to do with. And you know, no one really wanted it and there was more energy being produced that the homeowner was using, no battery to store it into. And so you had this big net metering battles.

And you know, I think we're beyond that now. I think we're past that, what we're basically saying, I think we all agree that you know, what you want is a complete system sitting behind the meter. Where the solar energy that's generated can be used by the home and what's not used can be stored in the battery.

And then if there's a market in front of the meter that pays you to discharge that battery to the grid so you can get paid or optimize for your time of use rate. The AI that we built into our systems does that for you while you sleep or while you work.

And that's what we've evolved into. And I think, you know, and because of that and because it's scalable, and I should talk about that a little bit too, like, can this really move the needle, right.? You know, don't we need nuclear and all of that?

But, I think because it works and we have millions of systems operating, we have over 86 million micros already in the field, both in our batteries and on the roof. We have enough data to have built an enormous amount of confidence that the uptime of our systems, meaning the availability of our systems to dispatch when the utilities need that capacity, that it works at really, really high upturn. I mean, in the high nineties. Okay.

We perform as well as a gas peaker plant, right? And then the, the problem with utility in the past was, well I don't want your solar. I don't know if I will use for it.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Marco Krapels: But now that we have complete systems, solar battery, bidirectional EV charger, and we can manage that capacity availability for them, and we are rolling out this quarter capacity forecasting so we can forecast in the near future what the available capacity is over our millions of customers by zip code. 'Cause we have the data, we have their consumption patterns, we have their, you know, production patterns of the solar. We know when they're home, we know when they're not. And we do a pretty damn good job at capacity forecasting.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Marco Krapels: So all of that we can give to the utilities as tools to manage their resource adequacy, you know, requirements and all of that. And so I think you know what we've done, and this is also with the work of, you know, the early adopters, like the Octopus Gnergy, like Green Mountain Power. We've proven that this really works and it can work at scale.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break.

When we come back, let's talk about how utilities are getting on board with the big vision and then how my literal favorite thing bi-directional charging is coming and could change the game completely.

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We're talking with Marco Krapels from Enphase.

Molly Wood: And so where are the utilities in this conversation? Is it changing pretty fast? 'cause that seems, that seems to be the key bottleneck.

Marco Krapels: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, you know, we used to, yeah. First of all, this business is a humble business, right. Not that everyone's got their door open, ready to receive you, you know, red carpet rolled out, CEO ready to meet you.

It's got, it's a humble business, but as we run into each other at the different dinners, and recently I was at a dinner, uh, which included, I was a nice dinner hosted by, by Octopus. Uh, and, uh, and the British, uh, Consul General. And it included, um, the, the big regulators and the, the heads of those agencies and we're all starting to have a conversation.

And then on the utility side as well, we used to have a hard time speaking to mid-level management about what we could do for them. But now we're meeting with the CEOs and the second in-commands about figuring out how we can help them solve their problem.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Marco Krapels: And because we have this flexible capacity that matters to them. And so, and the, and the data centers like this idea because, um, you get communities engaged in a positive way to enable the interconnection of a large load because the communities can have assets sitting at their home, like the batteries that can dispatch and they can get paid for it.

And so the paradigm really is shifting and um, uh, which is good for our company and, you know, we manufacture all of this in the United States. We have factory, a huge one in Arlington, Texas. Um, and we can spit out the equivalent of a nuclear power plant a year out of those factories in the United States.

And so, you know, and also if we looked at our existing customer base, you know, I, I, someone told me the other day, well, we need, you know, 10 nuclear power plants in the United States in the next year, uh, to meet the, you know, demand for AI. Guys, all we need to do is upgrade, uh, the existing homes we already have that are solar only.

We have in the United States alone, we have 3 million of them, and we can unleash tens of gigawatts of new generation capacity. And if we add batteries to those systems, um, uh, storage capacity and to turn all of that into firm capacity, problem solved. And so I think, you know, you know…

Molly Wood: With clean energy, with clean energy.

Marco Krapels: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And, and back to what, you know, Chamath, we were talking about earlier, what he posted, which got, by the way, reposted by Donald Trump, of all people. Uh, I love seeing this 'cause it's not a partisan issue. Like, we need to solve this problem together. Like, I really believe that, uh, the United States can and will win this AI race.

But back to Jensen. What he said is the first layer of the AI cake is energy. And we can solve that and we just need to really leverage what's already available. This does not have to be a utility scale, large battery only solution. This can be done at a distributed level, which engages the homeowner in a positive way, right? And right now that homeowner is, feels a bit disenfranchised when these things are built in their backyard.

Molly Wood: Right. I wanna ask you about that part too, because yeah. As we sort of go through our constituents here, you do have individual homeowners saying, no, we absolutely do not wanna have to turn our lights off or turn our heat down, or turn our air conditioning up so that we can feed a data center…

Marco Krapels: Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood: Power. And it feels like that is a pretty important part of the message.

But I, it also makes me wonder, it, you know, if these companies, let's go back to Jansen and Nvidia, or let's go to Meta, or let's go to Google.

Marco Krapels: Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood: Um, at what point should they just be buying solar panels and batteries for homes in communities where they want to build data centers?

Like we know that they are already starting to invest in their own power generation.

Marco Krapels: Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood: And maybe start to bypass utilities. Like, I just wonder what the future starts to look like, where maybe the room is just you and a hyperscaler and a mayor.

Marco Krapels: [Laughs] Um…

Molly Wood: It's a little dystopian. It's, but I read a lot of science fiction, so I just, you know.

Marco Krapels: You know, it's, well. Let's say we're having a lot of discussions. Um, I'm not gonna say that this is an impossible solution. Um, I think it could be one of them.

I do believe though, that, um, you know, there are two trains of thought, right? One is the data center is gonna set separate, not connected to the grid. Right.

Molly Wood: Right.

Marco Krapels: And it's just gonna build its own generation capacity, which most of the time includes gas, unfortunately.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Marco Krapels: Which is bad for the community. It's just bad.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Marco Krapels: Um, you don't wanna live next to a large gas power plant. You don't. Um, and, and so I, I think the right model is, is for those data centers to be connected to the grid. But to have thousands of homeowners in a service territory participate.

And you are right, could the cost of the batteries be bought down by the big hyperscaler so that it could facilitate and speed up and enable interconnection of that large load? Yes. Um, could, you know, and we still have, particularly if we work with TPOs, which are, you know, third party owners of those batteries, uh, that can lease the batteries, right?

Um, the, uh, hyperscaler could work with, uh, a particular utility servicing that area, uh, to support the payments of VPP benefits to the homeowner. So to be paid for participating in a virtual power plant, and imagine you're the homeowner and you lease the battery…

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Marco Krapels: Where your lease rate is bought down by both the utility and the hyperscale that need that battery access to be able to balance peaks capacity and what have you.

And the lease is brought, brought down from what maybe would be $80 to $15 a month.

Molly Wood: Right.

Marco Krapels: And then for $15 a month you have a battery that, um, is used to provide remote capacity credits to the hyperscaler, but also part of the capacity in that battery can be programmed to be always available for backup for your home.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Marco Krapels: So now you provide resiliency to a community in an area that's prone to outages. Texas has a lot of outages, big storms. Climate change turns out to be real and, you know. And so now you provide resiliency to the homeowner, which improves the quality of service that the utility provides. And then maybe 80% of the capacity of the battery is used to provide capacity offsets or firm up, uh, the capacity for the data center, and it reduces then the overall generation that they need to build.

Right. And so that is for sure the solution. Um, we're having a lot of those discussions at the right level, um, and I think you're gonna see some substance be put behind that vision, certainly this year.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Marco Krapels: I'm really excited about it. I mean, this is like, for someone like myself who had been doing this for a long time, you know, a couple of decades, it's a dream come true because, you know, we are really seeing the next phase of distributed renewable energy.

And it's not a dumb solar. It's smart, flexible assets that participate in distributed power plants that enable the interconnection of data centers, which the United States needs in order to continue to be a leader in that space. So it's um, you know, I think we're all, we'll be part of something great.

Molly Wood: How does this then translate? You know, we're talking about this mostly in the context of data centers because they are for, they are sort of a forcing function for these conversations.

Marco Krapels: Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood: But load growth is a phenomenon across the country, even in places that don't necessarily have data center demand that just simply have more electrification or more gadgets online, or more people moving.

And so I wonder how this starts to, you know, set a tone, become a model. Because you know, the one thing that VPAs can't solve so far, VPPs can't solve, so far, is distribution.

Marco Krapels: That's true.

Molly Wood: This totally works. If you put it on all the houses in Virginia or in Texas. How do we, we still have that, like we still have that middleman problem of the transmission.

Marco Krapels: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I, I think what we can also do, right, and, and this is where we're actually having an, you know, pretty big chunk of a, of an executive team, of a large utility here, come over in a few weeks because we sat down with them and they said, listen, we, we, we know exactly by zip code where we need more distributed storage.

Molly Wood: Right.

Marco Krapels: Um, and also around substations that need to be firmed up where, you know, there may be areas where there is, uh, a lot of EV ownership and they all plug in at the same time and there's a risk of transformers blowing up. Right. So, so they know by zip code already where they need it and we're gonna see what we can do with them to implement a program to do exactly that.

So, you know, I think, and again, you know, I think this distributed capacity, like what we deploy, can really help solve problems. And then the utility can decide, where do I implement my largest incentives, right? So maybe rather than across the board, one size fits all, everybody gets two or $3,000 off a battery. If you add one and you allow the utility to access it, maybe it's like, I've got the biggest problem in this zip code and my incentives are gonna be bigger here, and this is really our need to deploy this capacity.

Um, fire prone areas, you know, where there are a lot of PSPs, right. You're gonna want to, you know, make sure that, yeah. We, we all know what it's like. Right? Yeah. And you're gonna want a lot of customers to be able to do that. And so, and then the other one, you know, is of course, and I know we'll get to it, but I think, you know, we've got, uh, millions of EVs already on the road.

Molly Wood: Yes. Let's talk bidirectional. This is our moment.

Marco Krapels: Yeah. It's so cool. But it, it all, it just, it completes, I call it the flex bundle, right? Yeah. You've got solar, you've got the battery, and now soon you have the bidirectional EV charger.

And what the bidirectional EV charger allows you to do is if the grid is down, your car can back up your home. So there's a microgrid that's formed with your car being basically the supplier of energy and, you know, capacity to your home. And, um, and, and there's a smart switch in there.

And so, and then when, uh, the grid is up, but your, uh, battery is full and you still have hours until you're gonna use your car, because we're gonna understand your patterns. We know when you're home, we know when you don't go and you can program this, uh, to be smart.

So you can say, I want you to AI-optimize my EV charging, you know, I, what do you wanna do? What do you wanna maximize backup? You wanna maximize earnings, or do you wanna toggle in between?

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Marco Krapels: So basically, you know, but if you wanna maximize earnings, then we're gonna make that EV battery capacity available in front of the meter, uh, to the VPP operator that wants to access that capacity. And then when it does, you know, we discharge a certain amount of the battery and we can set that, again.

You may say, listen, every morning when I wake up, I need a hundred miles of battery. You need to go back and forth to work fine, but then maybe another 200 miles of charge, right, that we can dispatch into the grid and get you paid a lot of money, a lot more than it costs you to charge. There may be times where you can charge the car for free.

Like I'll give you an example. In the Netherlands right now, where we have partnerships with the three major utilities that, uh, service 80% of Dutch customers. The opportunity there is because they have, they had pricing. And it's a deregulated market, it’s where as a customer there, uh, because you have 15 minute interval pricing, sometimes there's so much wind energy, 'cause Netherlands has massive amounts of offshore wind. There's so much wind energy that, um, you get paid to consume. And so that's the moment where you know, you wanna charge as much as you can, your battery at home, your car, because you actually get paid to consume because there's negative energy pricing.

So as we go into markets that become really dynamic, and you know, in the United States we have two markets, right? We have deregulated markets and regulated markets. You know, Texas allows us to do a lot more. And then you have regulated markets like California that are operating a little differently, but what I do believe is that we're gonna see this everywhere.

You're gonna have market mechanisms that will come into place. Yes, we need to work with the PC. Yes, we need to work with the California Energy Commission and the utilities and the big data center guys. But you're gonna have market mechanisms in place that will allow the optimization for this bundled flexible capacity to have real value, not just behind the meter, but also in front of the meter.

And the bidirectional EV charger is just, allows you to access another 70 kilowatt hours of capacity, which is like seven times the average battery, and that's really exciting.

Now we have to work with the OEMs, you know, the EV manufacturers, um, make sure that, you know, uh, we're fully integrated with them and that if you buy, you know, whatever car it is that you buy, EV, that EV is integrated with the bi-directional EV charger that can participate with these programs.

And that's why we spend so much time with utilities because you want the utility to create an incentive program so that you get paid for discharging your car to the grid.

Molly Wood: Right.

Marco Krapels: And at the same time, we need the, um, OEMs for the car manufacturers to allow that bidirectionality and that integration, and I think it all just is gonna come together.

And so the, um, opportunity to add more value to our existing customers, uh, who may have, I call it the dumb EV charge, we're gonna upgrade them with a smart bidirectional EV charger is massive.

Molly Wood: Yep.

Marco Krapels: And you know, it allows you backup up for your home, but it also allows you to make real money, uh, with a dispatch. And that's pretty exciting.

Molly Wood: I mean, just to, you know, have another sci-fi moment, like you really could imagine a world in the near future where with clean energy generation, batteries, this kind of aggregation and the demand that both utilities and data centers have. No consumer should be paying for power.

Marco Krapels: Yeah, I mean, really. I mean really we should all make, we should all make enough to offset the cost, you know?

Molly Wood: Yep.

Marco Krapels: There may be some hours that you pay, but there may be some, there may be many hours that you're gonna make money.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Marco Krapels: And so I always tell people, I said, guys, we went from a savings kind of model to get Enphase, get paid.

And, um, you know, I, I really like that. That's something that is exciting. You know, it's interesting. People, uh, buy something out of fear, vanity, or greed. There are three reasons why people buy anything at all. It's fear, vanity, or greed.

And, um, you know, our, I think our product looks good. [Laughs] Um, you know, um, you know, the microinverter is nice and small sits behind the panel there. There's not some big box making a bunch of noise on your wall. Um, and you know, the batteries also get more slick every year. The bidirectional EV charger is a beautiful product too. Um, you're gonna be proud to have that hanging in your garage.

Molly Wood: Yeah, when is that product coming out, by the way? Because I'm not upgrading my car or getting a battery until that product is out.

Marco Krapels: I think you're, you're gonna see it as the second half of the year.

Molly Wood: Great.

Marco Krapels: So, uh, you don't have to wait much longer. And then, you know, in terms of greed, uh, we all wanna make money. Um, ideally by doing absolutely nothing, so the AI will do it for you. So we have that. Um, and then, you know, in terms of fear, um, we have all experienced outages.

Molly Wood: Yeah, exactly.

Marco Krapels: And they're gonna be more frequent. And our grid is not ready for what's coming. So I think, you know, everyone having at least a small battery in their home to have that security is good. Um, some people need it because they're, you know, nm three customers and you don't get paid for exporting energy, so you wanna store it, use more of it yourself, uh, participate in VPPs, make more money. So I think the fear, greed and vanity boxes are gonna be ticked really well.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Marco Krapels: And um, it's, it's, um, it's, it's, you know, I think, as I said, we had the first phase, which was fairly dumb solar, which was great. You know, people participated, they saved some money. It was all about savings.

Now we go into the next phase, which is, you know, which complete smart, bundled, flex energy systems behind the meter that make money for you in front of the meter. That's where we're going.

Molly Wood: Marco, this is fantastic. Thank you so much for the time. I will be refreshing the website for the bidirectional charger.

Marco Krapels: Awesome. We'll be there for you. Thanks for having me, Molly.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: And that's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening. Let's get on board with this vision of our free energy future, am I right? Or tell me if I'm tripping. Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in[at]everybodyinthepool.com.

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