Episode 126: How Budderfly Turns Wasted Energy into a Win-Win-Win

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.

So last week we talked about Mitra EV and how that company was tackling electrifying vehicle fleets at small to mid-size businesses.

This week brings us an interesting twist on a similar concept with a company that's bringing energy efficiency to small and mid-size buildings, but with the most clever cut and paste model that I don't even wanna spoil. Oh, and in the process, they're building one of the largest virtual power plants in the United States.

Let's get to it.

Al Subbloie: I am Al Subbloie. I'm the president, CEO, and founder of Budderfly, that's with two Ds. And we are an energy as a service company who's grown, uh, very quickly in the last eight years, and we're trying to tackle the climate problem with a profit based capitalistic approach for the benefit of scaling and having an impact on our customers and the environment.

Molly Wood: So tell me a little bit about your background. You've built multiple successful companies across telecom, software, and now energy. What, what brought you to energy and then made you think about this solution?

Al Subbloie: It's, it's a great question. Uh, I am a big believer in disrupting markets and building players that could become number one in a space, but have a, a major impact.

Therefore, um, I do, I would rather go after a macro environment, even if I don't come from the space. And I know that sounds a bit counterintuitive, but I would prefer to have a fresh look at a space. I really love some of the macro dynamics of the energy space. Back in 2017 when we built the business model, it is one of those annuity markets, you just can't live without it. And you can't build a company without it. You can't. None of us can. I like that aspect of it.

It didn't have the growth aspects that it has today with the data center and AI, uh, trends that are certainly happening, but I also found it to be a very inefficient market. Which can really be disruptive in positive ways for the benefit of customers and you know, the environment itself became more, uh, people became more aware of that. It was more important to the world. And I really like that value proposition, especially to build a business. And let's face it, I sleep better at night knowing you can build a capital model that also helps save the world at the same time.

Molly Wood: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so let's, let's talk a little more about the company energy as a service. Now there are those who would say energy is already a service.

Al Subbloie: Yes.

Molly Wood: That I pay for, I maybe pay too much for. What are, what's the, what are you actually doing? Tell me the details.

Al Subbloie: Let me, I, I, Molly, I like to start out with a problem.

It's always, uh, it's, it's a simple problem to understand. It's funny, nobody debates what I'm gonna tell you is the major issue, that we waste somewhere between 25 and 35% of what we use. We don't need to use it. We can still do all the things we want to do. Stay warm, stay cool, build a business, have our customers be happy and not use it.

And it drove me crazy when solar began to become popular, that people were spending capital to power something that you don't need to use. That seemed really dumb to me, and I began to explore why we waste that, how come the world hasn't addressed the problem. And it's actually quite simple that there's not one or two things you can do to solve the problem. There's probably 20, 30, 40, 50 things to do, and that's very daunting for any customer to tackle.

And the second is we live in a world of capitalism. If you don't have a really good handle on your return on investment, most people don't wanna spend the money on one or two things, nevermind 30 or 40 things.

So we decided to make it simple. We said, Hey, this is tailor made to outsource the problem. Let's become an expert in solving that problem. Therefore we defined outsourcing where we take over the entire thing. We take over the bill, we become the customer of record, we fix the billing. We still use all the data from the utility, but we made it a clean bill that automatically tells us all what we're saving while we're doing it, and we do that with the customer.

We start out with a baseline of what they have been spending. Then we take it over. We spend our money, Molly, at our risk, typically over a period of 10 to 15 years. To do all the things that you should do to go capture that 30%, and then we use that 30% to pay for everything at our own risk. We have a little profit margin, but we're incredibly transparent to the customer so they see the benefit and they don't have to lift a finger to get it done because they're not lifting many fingers to get it done as we know.

And that's one of the reasons I think we have a climate problem, which I think could almost be fixed by just fixing the inefficiency.

Molly Wood: So tell me about that, the stuff that they should be doing that they're not doing, that you come in and do once you take over.

Al Subbloie: Right. So your question would be, uh, how does anyone go after that 30%? Yeah, that's the, the ultimate question. I, I always try to simplify the answer. Uh, four, there's, there's four pillars, uh, typically of what I would say use categories, uh, in a commercial business.

HVAC is probably the largest. You know, we as humans don't like to be hot and sweat. Now, maybe back in the sixties and the seventies, people dealt with it. The HVAC uh, trend really got penetrated heavily between the seventies, the eighties, and the nineties. And the funny part is I think we're living with all the same equipment that was bought then today.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Al Subbloie: Even though we as people kind, have built equipment that's literally 50% more efficient. Then what was put in then, so everything HVAC related, and when I bring up a category, that category is usually made up of 10, 15, 18 different things within that category.

So I'm giving you the categories. A good example with an HVAC would be a, a highly AI, um, capable thermostat that's fully connected. That thinks ahead of time. It's smart. As an example, uh, VFDs variable frequency drives. There's all kinds of things to go after that with an HVAC.

Second would be lighting and everything lighting related, including controls and dimming. And we all think that we put an LED in and we're done. You know, we as humans make things that last five or 10 years not much longer, including lighting. So we have a recycle opportunity all the time, and LEDs are getting 20, 30% more efficient every five or six years, as an example.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Al Subbloie: Uh, refrigeration, anything refrigeration oriented, if you think about it, it's really a specialty HVAC device that keeps things cool or freezer. There are all sorts of things you can do, uh, within refrigeration components to drive that 20, um, or 30%.

The last piece would be, uh, what I call, uh, really intelligent management. Which does require specialty equipment within any, any facility and a lot of software to do the job really well. A good example of that would be if you're a business, you open up at eight in the morning and you flip on all your switches, you end up with a big peak load as an example.

That peak load can be managed effectively by putting, let's say, 30 seconds to two minute span between each turn on and automating that function. Same with VPPs. Uh, we understand that we could get rid of peaks when they're happening by having smart software in that be smart enough to know don't start the HVAC compressor for eight minutes, right? Let's let it go up a degree and then do it later so we don't stack a peak, which has a huge impact on the grid right now. It's one of the big issues with data centers as we speak.

So I'm giving you a flavor and it goes from anything that's simple, like putting in a light. Calling it a day and I'm done to having a very complex set of software that's managing VPPs and different equipment within the enterprise.

We look at it all as important for the benefit of ending up simply with a better outcome on managing energy for the entire facility, which comes out of the bottom of the bill with a bill that's a lot lower. Right? Using less energy that we can then give back to the grid.

Molly Wood: Um, I feel like we should specify if we did not that your customers are commercial, right? Like a McDonald's franchise. Like let's go all the way back to who calls you to start doing this?

Al Subbloie: It's a great, it's a good question. Uh, and I, I always like to acknowledge, you know, when we thought of the model, we thought of a lot of things. I did not originally think of the target segment that we ended up in.

Uh, it was, you know, things happen in a company of..

Molly Wood: Who, who did you think it was going to be?

Al Subbloie: You know, I come from a world where we sell, uh, we used to be able to do business with big enterprises. Okay. The big banks.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Al Subbloie: Insurance companies, tech firms. And you would think, hey, those folks are spending the most on energy, 'cause they're big, they have a lot of buildings and a lot of facilities.

We ended up, we landed, uh, Subway, the, the sandwich shop. And at that time it was 2017, we happen to land anything. And we started out with 40 Subways. And what we learned quickly was two, two major, um, characteristics that became very important to our growth curve.

One was copy exact where each location acts the same. Take any other environment, where do you, you get 14,000 McDonald's where a lot of the equipment is almost identical.

Molly Wood: Got it.

Al Subbloie: And with that, we are able to solve the problem for five or 10. The first five or 10 are the toughest. Once we solve them, we can pretty much predict how the other 14,000 are gonna behave.

That in a way, gives Budderfly access to almost unlimited capital to do it. Because we have a model that we have a return that could be measured. No one will question how McDonald's number 1,453 is gonna behave.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Al Subbloie: Because we've done that many ahead of time. So we began to really like, uh, facilities that are, uh, one of many that are very similar.

Molly Wood: Interesting. So basically, franchises for the most part.

Al Subbloie: Well, right.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Al Subbloie: So we parlayed that one brand. Into over 200 to 250 brands. We have 'em all right now at varying degrees. Uh, some we have hundreds, some we have 10, some we have thousands. And we just keep going and going and going because we're getting very good at it.

So you name a brand in that market? We probably have them, uh, at some degree.

Molly Wood: That's so interesting. Do you do Orangetheory? I was in that cult for a while.

Al Subbloie: So then we expanded that, expanded that to fitness centers, because that has the same characteristics. Also, I don't, I don't wanna be concentrated.

Molly Wood: That's so, that's such an interesting software like approach though, right? It's sort of like solve one for many lower marginal cost over time.

Al Subbloie: It is. You had asked me a question at the beginning, I didn't fully answer it. My background, uh, is a software, um, combined with services. So a lot of our, um, the people that are here are software mentality folks, so we built a tremendous amount of technology to do this in a repeatable, scalable, measurable fashion. That way you can scale.

So I think a lot of the market has not successfully tackled that small, medium sized business opportunity. My view of it is the following. You take a McDonald's, it's 14,000 of 'em. It's probably about a billion, in electric spend, a billion dollars.

Molly Wood: Wow.

Al Subbloie: You name one, you know, global 5,000 company that spends a billion, you're not gonna find many.

Molly Wood: Right. Wow, that's fascinating. And then when you start to translate that into gigawatts or megawatts rather, and climate, you know, gets to be huge. Yeah.

Al Subbloie: It, it is huge. And what's interesting is, but the only way it gets used is you can aggregate 'em.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Al Subbloie: Let's take a, a city or a metropolitan area within a utility.

If you, if you had, uh, you know, 200, let, let's say you had a thousand of these, or 2000 or 5,000, we have the ability to push a button once and immediately make things happen in 2000 places.

Molly Wood: Right.

Al Subbloie: And that's been the strategy, the vision, we spent a lot of money on it. You know, we're 500 people. Today we've raised over a billion dollars, um, which we are investing in all these things, including our customers.

Molly Wood: Yeah, I mean, that's what I was gonna ask you is about the financing model. So you, you come in, you say to a business, you know, we'll make all your locations. More sustainable, but more importantly, we will save you money. Um, and they don't have any upfront costs. How are you shouldering that upfront cost? Is it all your investment? Is it, you know, what are the finance mechanisms that make this go?

Al: So we, we have raised a billion to a billion-one. Uh, about half of that's been in equity and half has been in debt. Uh, and we're able to get the debt because of the repeatability and the predictability of the way energy operates in these very like facilities in multiple segments, right?

We're expanding from restaurants to retail, uh, c stores, uh, fitness centers as an example, and, and soon we also, like, uh, small manufacturers, they tend to be common, so that's enabled us to go get uh, debt as well as equity. We get a little bit of both. So we, we just buy things. We may be one of the largest buyers today in the US of high efficiency HVAC units. Probably, I think we installed near 5,000 of those units last year.

Molly Wood: Wow.

Al Subbloie: Alone. These are big, these are, you know, seven ton. 10 ton, you know, they're, you know, a thousand, 1500 pounds. They're not small. Uh, and we’re, we're doing probably between a hundred and we're doing approximately 150 to 200 facilities a month on an average of two to five units per… lot of cranes.

Molly Wood: Yeah. Seriously.

Al Subbloie: We're doing lighting, refrige—. We, we install all the stuff we're talking about. We also recently in the last years added water.

Molly Wood: Oh, okay. Tell me about that.

Al Subbloie: Well, you know, another scarce resource. Especially in, in some cities it's almost identical to electric and gas for us.

Uh, we acquired a unique technology. It's a valve that sits behind the water meter. It removes the turbulence to get a more accurate measurement, but we also will put in low flow fixtures. Uh, we'll do things on nozzles, and we're saving about 20% on water as well. Same model, almost identical.

Molly Wood: Hmm. What, and what is the, I mean, I feel like I already know this answer, but I guess I wonder in your conversations with these businesses, how much are you even talking about sustainability?

Like, we're gonna talk about quantifying your impact in a minute, but. You know, you mentioned capitalism right up front, like I'm, does it even come up or are you just saving them money?

Al Subbloie: You know, Molly, I majored in economics in college. I, uh. I, I love the philosophy of economics. Capitalism is what it is, and I always say to people, the jungle's the jungle, don't blame me for the fact that it exists. You have to figure out how to operate in the jungle.

You know, the whole, the whole climate effort. What does drive me a bit crazy, and the way I articulate it, uh, to folks, you have to lead with capitalism. It's really hard to impact this world without having the money to do so. So the, the number one goal is to have a model where everybody wins financially.

Crucial. What we did is we, and I did this on purpose, I aligned the climate reduction opportunity directly to the amount of money that gets saved directly. And if you think about when we invest in all this, we're driving literally carbon out of the air, almost identical to the amount of money being saved through the investment of all these upgrades.

Now, let's face it, the business gets a better operation. They get better air. They have crisper, uh, environment for their customers. Their business goes up, they're happy. And I always say to them, listen, if the number one reason you did this was to save the world, I applaud you.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Al Subbloie: If it's not and you want to go to the cocktail party and get a pat on the back, you can do it 'cause you're getting it no matter what.

Right? You're getting carbon reduction as part of it. However, you choose to articulate that to the world to make that your number one or number two, or number three or some people don't care. That's really up to you. You get it no matter what.

My view of it is, if you don't believe in it. I still believe it pollutes the air. There's some thickness in this stuff and I don't like breathing it. So as a worst case, you ought to really care. If you ask my opinion, I'd say half of our customers care, roughly half.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Al Subbloie: Of that half. Half of that half cares a lot. The other half cares enough if they can save money; they'd like to talk about it and probably the other half is not their number one priority.

Molly Wood: Right.

Al Subbloie: I'm just giving you a sense for this industry. 'cause listen, in this market, it's a, it's a low margin business, right? So there's a some element of survival, expansion of margins that they think about on a daily basis. But we help that, right? We spend our money to fix the problem in its entirety within their operation and they end up with a brand new infrastructure. They're pretty happy about it.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about how companies should totally be bragging about this and about how when you are in charge of the energy production of something like 7,000 buildings, you're just a pretty good sized little power plant, aren't ya?

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We're talking with Al Subbloie of Budderfly.

Molly Wood: It is really interesting too because I, I would love to know if I were going to one of those businesses that had made this choice, you know, that had meant like if I, if, if, if my local Orangetheory said we have all sustainable heating and cooling and light bulbs, that would be, you know, for me, for a small number of us, it would be like, oh, I choose that over, you know, I don't know the, the barre place. I'm a little immersed in the fitness conversation here.

Al Subbloie: We, we agree. We, we've even talked about, uh, the, the sticker

Molly Wood: Yes.

Al Subbloie: That goes on the front door. And, 'cause I do believe it will increase business. Uh, and we're, we're actually working on that where we, we have a certification stamp. The Budderfly name is getting out there enough that, that more people, again, we're not a huge, although, you know, we did a quarter of a billion in revenue last year.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Al Subbloie: Uh, you know, we up 50% from the prior year and we'll have the same growth rate next this year and next year. Uh, so we're getting to be well known. But, you know, I would say publicizing that even has a selfish benefit to more customers that come to you. You know, you, you, you don't, whether you want it to be religion or non-religion, I love align, aligning capitalism perfectly with saving the world.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Al Subbloie: What's wrong with that? Mm-hmm. It's a wonderful value proposition. People ought to be feeling good about what it does to not only their business, but also the world we live in and their kids.

Molly Wood: One of the other things you mentioned is virtual power plants and the ability to kind of harness this saved energy and turned that into an asset a little bit. Tell us, for those who don't know, virtual power plants are becoming just such a bigger part of the energy conversation writ large, and I would love if you could sort of explain what that means and how it fits into your business.

Al Subbloie: So let me start out maybe with a simple explanation of what it means there. There are two measurement, uh, tools in energy. One is it, it's almost like your odometer. It clicks away your kilowatt hour usage. It's your usage. No matter when it happens, it just clicks and clicks and clicks.

The other is, at any point in time, the stacking of what's on creates a peak moment. Why that's important is that peak moment when you're a utility and you add up all the connected facilities to the utility, and there's a lot of 'em. That peak moment on all of them at any point in time has to be driven by energy creation at that moment in time. Otherwise, bad things happen. Like there's not enough to go around.

There's nothing worse than not enough to go around. It's called a blackout, and honestly, it's the ugliest thing that could ever happen to all kinds of stuff. Bad stuff happens, so the poor utility and ISOs are sitting there having, you know, the gerbils on the treadmill saying, how many do I need at this moment in time?

They do their best to estimate all that. There are a lot of people that believe the data center, uh, demand supply imbalance, 'cause demand has now gone up more than supply is more of a, when the supply is available than whether there's enough supply.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Al Subbloie: And it means there's not enough at times that you need it.

So there's a lot of people that believe if you shift when you use the power to a period when the world needs it more, that power is worth more to the world, right?

VPP is just meant to do that. Virtual power plant says, you know what? Let's be smarter about when we use it. Let's try to shift it.

An example of that would be four o'clock in an August afternoon. You know, let's lower the thermostat two degrees. That would peel off some peak. That goes into that stack. If I did that in a thousand McDonald's, I would give back, you know, megawatts and you wouldn't have to have a nuclear power plant spin up or a peaker oil gas plant spin up.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Al Subbloie: And if you start to scale that concept, and let's do one other thing. Let's put a battery there.

Molly Wood: Yep.

Al Subbloie: If I keep it in the battery and the grid needs it, and I got a thousand of 'em out there. All of a sudden we've got this flex power network that the utility just says now, and boom, out of nowhere comes this mass increase in power without having to burn and a little bit of gas or oil anywhere.

Molly Wood: Right. Or even turn the heat down.

Al Subbloie: Or even turn the heat down. And listen a degree, if you're in a business, whether you're in a summer, whether you're 71 degrees or 72 degrees. Or even 73 degrees at a moment, you can live with that, especially if you save some money doing it, right?

Molly Wood: Yeah, for sure.

Al Subbloie: You do that a thousand times over, you're talking a megawatt megawatts of of impact on, on the grid. So the flex, there's a lot of people that believe that the power plan of the future is managing behind the meter better.

So you asked about us. What did we do? We built a business model where we're almost a demand side, you know, virtual private utility. We own everything behind the meter. We have all the tools, the hardware, the control mechanisms. Not only have we put in more efficient things that run those hours down, we have the control to be able to say, Hey, you know what? That freezer, let it go to five degrees instead of zero, it's still gonna be frozen.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Al Subbloie: Let's take two degrees off the thermostat immediately. Let's give 20 kilowatts back for an hour. And oh, by the way, why don't we also fill the battery up at night or with solar and now we're really gonna be able to flood the grid when they need it, right? To do what they need to do. So imagine this sort of flex power network of these small businesses that add up to a huge amount of power.

Maybe we don't need or have a problem with this data center demand supply issue. We created a kilowatt outta nothing.

Molly Wood: Well, and what's so, what's particularly compelling is the geographic proposition, right? Like Facebook's campus is just one place, one building in one place. For example, I mean, and you know, they have offices up in other places, but you've got Nat, you have a national flex network.

Because it, because you know, what we tend to run into in the VPP conversation is the problem of distribution.

Al Subbloie: Correct.

Molly Wood: Like I might be able to flex that power in one location, but that doesn't help me nationally. And you're sort of saying actually, 14,000 McDonald's all over the, it can all over the country.

Al Subbloie: It can. Now, that said, you are right. I, I, listen, I have my criticisms of what I call a supply driven electric mentality.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Al Subbloie: The, the grid was built with a supply driven mentality. It wasn't thinking about all this, and it is somewhat disparate, but let, let again, I didn't make the jungle. It's not my fault.

We're talking right now. Do we go to Virginia and put five to 10 salespeople within one, you know, one grid point. And go out there and find a thousand to 2000 locations and basically be the source of power for the need because that's a big data center area. Same thing for Texas. We can certainly do that. We could begin to concentrate ourselves. So we're having discussion about that for the future.

Molly Wood: Yeah,

Al Subbloie: About, 'cause listen, we could do business anywhere, right? We have a choice. Uh, right now we're all over it. We're 50 states, we're everywhere. Some states have high rates, some states have low rates. Demand is a problem in some, not in others.

So we might cater to where the need is most and be able to deal with that geographical dispersion.

Molly Wood: Yeah. Do you foresee a universe in which you work directly with hyperscalers? Let's say?

Al Subbloie: Oh my God, I do, I do. So you know, the regulated utility supply driven mentality six, seven years ago, hard to open a door to do a lot of unique and creative, innovative things. Changing.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Al Subbloie: You know, the likes of Meta and, and Google and Amazon and Microsoft who are spending. I mean, the amount of money going into data center creation is just astounding, but it's an opportunity and, uh, we happen to be, in my opinion, one of the three legs of the supply stool by creating supply. But we're creating it with what I call spontaneous generation. We're not burning anything to create it.

Molly Wood: Right.

Al Subbloie: We're creating it out of what you've been using.

Molly Wood: Right.

Al Subbloie: It's an, you think about it, it's hard for people to get their hands around and if you take that kilowatt right now, the way we operate, we give 'em the kilowatt right now. We save it. You got it. You might not have needed it right now.

So what we're contemplating is putting a lot of storage batteries in. Putting it into battery and all of a sudden someone says, oh, that's a new kilowatt.

Molly Wood: Yep.

Al Subbloie: That's a, that's a very different philosophical. So we're, again, you have to look at us as a lot more than an energy as a service company.

It's certainly a means to an end. But we own, we, we cover cradle to grave on everything behind that meter, and we're just really trying to drive an optimal grid on the point that counts, the demand side. It seems like the world ignored that. And they're all supply driven in their mentality. So we're really trying to be just experts on the demand side of that, including what I call the endpoints.

The endpoints would be an HVAC unit is an endpoint, the more efficient one if you put a good one in. So that mentality's changing and we're doing our best to kind of teach the world of these opportunities.

Molly Wood: We skipped right over utilities in that scenario, but to what extent are you working with, with utilities, also?

Al Subbloie: Well, we work with 'em. We work with all probably 500 of 'em throughout the country. Because we are onboarding our customers and becoming the customer of record with many of 'em.

Molly Wood: Right.

Al Subbloie: And we're very good about paying. We, we have ACH so we're a really good customer. We're a big growing one for them. Um, and, and hopefully they, they enjoy and they love that.

We're also, we're doing some battery, uh, pilots with some of 'em because of storage. Listen, I think they're under pressure right now. With the data center thing and we're here to help. We're the clean company to help. We don't like put in, not saying nuclear power plants are bad, but let's face it, they have 10 and 15 year lead times and huge investments to get them done.

And we're here, like right now, we can do something about this today. We take advantage of their incentive programs. Uh, they like that 'cause they're trying to meet their quotas. So listen, we're spending the money, it's hard for people not to like us. We're, we're not asking them for money. We're writing all the checks and we're managing the environment really tightly. Hard to say, we're doing only good for the world right now.

Molly Wood: Right. How do you make, or, you know, I, I think you alluded to this, but let's be more specific. How do you make money? Is it on that kind of savings, like a margin on the power savings?

Al Subbloie: It is. If you, very simple, if you take, uh, any company has an energy bill for the last two years, we try to baseline about what they've operated at.

So think about that conceptually. We will typically then bill them for that baseline and we usually like to hand them a small discount benefit, no questions asked. They just get budget relief. Then we spend our own money to upgrade that site.

So let's just do the math. We typically, if we get to 30%, we try to, we can make some money. But if you think about it, let's say we're giving them two, three, 4%.

We're spending probably 15, 16, 18% over a period of 10 to 15 years. So we have, our contract term, Molly, is long enough for us to be able to amortize that cost over a period of time. So we're taking that savings and we're really good at this, and we're able to scientifically say we believe we can get that money back in five years.

Or six years as an example, because we're billing them the baseline, but then we're enjoying a bill that's lower, that the utility is billing us as the customer of record. Right. And it's in that difference that we're living. If you, if you add it up, we're probably handing the customer somewhere between 20 and 22%, maybe even 23 of that 30.

Molly Wood: Wow.

Al Subbloie: ‘Cause they're getting all new things. And by the way, we're buying them at cost. And we get really big discounts because we buy a lot.

Molly Wood: ‘Cause you buy a lot. Yep.

Al Subbloie: And we don't charge margin on anything. So everyone's getting a real benefit in this, including the people that are selling to us, which are able to sell at volume. Right?

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Al Subbloie: You, you could see the model of, of the way it was set up. I, there's a lot of issues in this industry. One is margin on margin. I, I believe a lot of customers don't do anything 'cause they think it's too expensive. A lot of people buy mid efficiency equipment because the high efficiency is too expensive.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Al Subbloie: Even though it's better and they don't know enough to get their money back in five six, they don't wanna wait that long. Right. But when you buy 5,000 units a year, you can get a pretty hefty discount. Our, our high efficiency purchases are less than what a customer's paying for a mid efficiency.

Molly Wood: Al Subbloie is CEO of Budderfly. That is Budderfly with two Ds. I feel like, I feel like keep an eye on Budderfly. It's, I I feel like you're about to be a utility.

Al Subbloie: I don’t know if I want to be a utility, Molly. [Laughs]

Molly Wood: But I don't think you want to, I dunno if you want to, but, you know, you're building like this conversation about power generation, you know, and, and granted, distribution is where it all falls apart in some ways.

Al Subbloie: Right.

Molly Wood: We have this, like, we have innovation at the ends of the barbell.

Al Subbloie: Yes.

Molly Wood: But it's all in play right now. It's just a real interesting time.

Al Subbloie: It is. You asked why I picked the energy space it needed, uh, a lot of innovative thinking, in my opinion.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Al Subbloie: And it does need a technology foundational element to scale these things.

We're not gonna have an impact on this. It's a big world out there, and we need to move quickly now. Now we have a capitalistic reason. We've got demand exceeding supply for data centers and ai. We need more power to get that done. Right?

Molly Wood: Yep. Yep.

Al Subbloie: And honestly, we save carbon. But the bottom line is clean energy is the best and there's no better energy than removing one you don't need to use here and use it over here.

Molly Wood: Absolutely.

Al Subbloie: That's probably the best kilowatt you could ever have, right?

Molly Wood: All right, well get that sticker deployed. I wanna start looking for it on doors. [Laughs]

Al Subbloie: Okay, Molly, appreciate being on the program. I've enjoyed, uh, the conversation with you and everything that you do in this market.

Molly Wood: Thanks so much for coming on.

Al Subbloie: Thanks, Molly.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

Next week, we are going to keep exploring this idea of how to harness a whole lot of power without building a whole lot of infrastructure. If we think even just a tiny bit differently. Remember Enphase, the home battery maker? They will be back on the show.

And I would love to hear from you. Would you go to a business just because they had a Budderfly sticker on the door showing that they are as energy efficient as possible? Let me know. Email me at in at everybodyinthepool.com.

You can also find all the latest episodes and subscribe to the newsletter at everybodyinthepool.com, the website. I've had some pretty good plant and book recommendations in the newsletter lately. And if you'd like to become a paid subscriber to this show and get an ad free version in return, just hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice. Thanks to those of you who already have.

Together we can get this done. See you next week.