Barry Cinnamon  00:00

The real cost of solar in Australia, before tariffs, $2.04

Nico Johnson  00:04

okay?

Barry Cinnamon  00:05

That's with a battery.

Nico Johnson  00:06

With a battery,

Barry Cinnamon  00:07

$2.04

Barry Cinnamon  00:08

with a battery. So

Barry Cinnamon  00:08

in

Nico Johnson  00:09

Australia, we're at two bucks a watt,

Barry Cinnamon  00:10

right? All right. And in the US, typically it's about five and a half dollars a watt for a decent system with a battery. Huge difference. Why is that difference?

Nico Johnson  00:19

If you are a listener of SunCast. You may have listened to the podcast where on father's day I went to Barry's Skunk Works in California to learn more about what he is thinking about at cinnamon energy systems. Barry and I have been in the in the game since before, many of these people, huh? I mean, you since 2001

Barry Cinnamon  00:37

2001

Barry Cinnamon  00:38

2001

Nico Johnson  00:39

2006 and there's this horizon that we always see a postcard from the future called Hawaii or Puerto Rico or Australia, in this case. And I invited Barry to come up and talk a little bit about one of the many things that frustrates. Barry about why we can't get where we want to go. You've been digging around into why the US solar and battery costs are so much higher than places like Australia. Barry, so I wanted to have you come demonstrate and illustrate for us what you have uncovered.

Barry Cinnamon  01:09

I was always puzzled by costs of solar around the world. Germany has historically been cheaper than the US, and then recently, there's been a lot of people saying that the costs in Australia are 60 cents a kilowatt hour for solar, and, you know, the dollar 10 or so for batteries. And I'm just kind of running the numbers of even if I got the equipment direct from China and had no hassles in the US, it would still be a lot more, right? But I'm just wondering why it was so cheap. It just so happens that I didn't go to, kind of design my winter vacation around going to Australia, Sydney, and then hung out in New Zealand after that, but really just to try and understand what we could possibly do here in the US to bring those costs down. And typically we hear about the issue being soft costs, yeah, basically not the hardware, but it's all the labor, all those permitting and things like that internet. And I look at the numbers from my company, saying, even if I were to wipe those out, I'm still not getting down to 60 cents or kilowatt. So I dug into it, and what I found, and by meeting with solars in Australia, and spend a lot of time there, diving into it, the real cost of solar in Australia before tariffs, $2.04

Nico Johnson  02:19

Okay,

Barry Cinnamon  02:20

that's with a battery,

Nico Johnson  02:21

with a battery,

Barry Cinnamon  02:22

for with a battery.

Barry Cinnamon  02:23

So

Nico Johnson  02:23

in Australia, we're at two bucks a watt,

Barry Cinnamon  02:25

right, all right. And then the US, typically it's about five and a half dollars a watt for a decent system with a battery. Huge difference. Why is that difference? So I'm starting to drill down and looking at those individual categories, the module, the batteries, the tariffs, the labor, the supply chain, the profits, all that. And this chart over here kind of shows those specific differences, category by category. And then I say, right, well, what can we fix? So first of all, I looked at solar in a battery. And then, since everybody's always talking about just solar, when I looked at the numbers in Australia, it's 82 cents a watt Yeah, for just solar, that's pretty terrific.

Nico Johnson  03:02

Yeah, of course,

Barry Cinnamon  03:03

now they have a 15 cent a watt incentive, which is, which is nice, but still, we're 330 we're 330 Yeah,

Nico Johnson  03:10

that's incredible.

Barry Cinnamon  03:12

And so why? When I looked at it, I realized there's a lot we can do locally. There's a lot we can do statewide, but the biggest drivers of these high costs are US federal policies.

Nico Johnson  03:23

No way.

Barry Cinnamon  03:23

It's it. It's go federal policy. So it's the manufacturing policies. You aluminum extrusions for frames of solar panels. First we have to pay us rates for aluminum. We don't spell a lot of aluminum here. The machining is expensive, the transportation is expensive. So that's, that's a big one, manufacturing

Barry Cinnamon  03:41

right?

Barry Cinnamon  03:41

We don't really have any fully automated lines right now for silicon and cells and everything else, although we have assembly plants. So that's one. The second is regulations.

Nico Johnson  03:50

Yeah,

Barry Cinnamon  03:50

yeah, we have safety regulations. Australia has them. They're comparable, but our labor costs are higher, the tax, Finance and Business

Nico Johnson  03:57

points. Wait, the regulations are comparable, but we're five times more expensive

Barry Cinnamon  04:02

to regulate. They have regulations three times. But it's still, when you look at the numbers and you know, they're still higher, the business policies are higher. And this is kind of interesting. When you look at how we have tax credits,

Nico Johnson  04:15

yeah, and

Barry Cinnamon  04:15

again, 3x it's, it's 3x and then finally, the direct tariffs and duties. So you look at in Australia, they get good, but very inexpensive racking directly from Shanghai. Yeah, the modules come directly from Shanghai, and it's pretty good product. Battery systems are also very

Barry Cinnamon  04:34

there.

Nico Johnson  04:34

As a result, no domestic racking in Australia.

Barry Cinnamon  04:38

No, I don't think there's a domestic anything in Australia? Well,

Nico Johnson  04:41

is that the, I guess that's that's gonna be the corollary is that the is that the market we that we want to incentivize, but carry on

Barry Cinnamon  04:46

so, so well, we have to, we have to figure out what we're trying to solve, right? There's two problems we know Australia

Nico Johnson  04:51

is arguably much closer to Shanghai. So

Barry Cinnamon  04:53

it's, it's closer. Do we want cheap energy? We want to create jobs in solar and. Manufacturing.

Nico Johnson  05:00

I thought it was yes.

Barry Cinnamon  05:01

And, well, I, you know, my view is, let's, let's, let's fill the installation queue. Let's get those construction people to work. That's gonna automatically drive in demand,

Nico Johnson  05:09

and it increases the quality of jobs.

Barry Cinnamon  05:12

It's, they're good jobs,

Nico Johnson  05:13

yes,

Barry Cinnamon  05:13

the US, the when we look at these high manufacturing costs and our manufacturing policy, every four years, we have a different president, and they change the policies. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's Bush one, Bush two, Obama, Trump, that's just a mess. So we just don't have steadiness. And if we were to put steadiness as far as putting those solar manufacturing policies in place, we would have factories making refined silicon ingots, modules, the whole thing. But it just keeps changing. And it's even worse for batteries, we're going into the same cookie cycle.

Nico Johnson  05:44

Yeah, you know, I can't What's, what's the lady's name that worked with liebrick, that does all the studies, she's Jenny. So Jenny Chase

Barry Cinnamon  05:52

did

Barry Cinnamon  05:53

an

Nico Johnson  05:53

excellent study on this. Like, what kind of jobs do we want to incentivize? Do we really think everybody wants to be the kind of factory worker that is employed in China and these factories, or do we want to incentivize folks to have more skilled labor?

Barry Cinnamon  06:06

She wrote an interesting, she did an interesting interview with Bloomberg New Energy Finance and Jenny Chase. She's, you know, gotten this. She basically said manufacturing solar panels is a really crappy business. That's right. And, you know, the Chinese, they kind of come and go. Same thing in the US. They go and they go. It's so incentive driven, so many changes. You basically have to redo the factory every three or four years of new technology.

Nico Johnson  06:28

Yep, I don't want to get you off your talk track. Oh,

Barry Cinnamon  06:31

this is good. So, so coming back to it, what are the things that we can do? What are the most effective things we can do? I'm going to skip down to the very bottom. Yeah, we are making progress with state by state permitting, regulation, interconnection solar app. That's terrific, but if we really want to get down to really cheap installed solar, it's eliminating the tariffs, eliminating interconnection requirements, engineering around the technical requirements, and creating a cheap and simple National Solar financing, which is a little trick.

Barry Cinnamon  07:03

Does

Nico Johnson  07:03

that look

Barry Cinnamon  07:04

like Green Bank? It looks like the green bank. But what's

Nico Johnson  07:07

capitalism?

Barry Cinnamon  07:08

Yes, you have competition. You have you have other companies that specialize in their business of providing solar financing and that kind of they're they're not supporting those financing tools. So yeah, it's tough. Yeah, we

Nico Johnson  07:19

had, I had a good conversation with Ravi nicoson from Atmos about this, you know, he points out a couple of things are his sort of the gong dealer fees and commissions. If we could, if we could somehow adjust them, we would get closer to the goal line.

Barry Cinnamon  07:37

But it's, it's still a very effective business model to drive very fast installations by just having door to door people knocking on doors and unfortunately lying, saying they're with the utility and they're trying to make a quarter million dollars to be at the top of the solar bro club.

Nico Johnson  07:50

Yeah. Well, I don't know if you heard I was totally aghast in the interview I did with TJ last week that he said door to door is still the number one way to sell solar.

Barry Cinnamon  07:59

I'm glad you mentioned that to me. I spent, it's a two and a half hour interview. It took me three workout sessions to go through the whole thing. I backed it up to the tub one minute 12 one hour, 12 minutes when he started talking about the integrations he did,

Nico Johnson  08:12

yeah,

Barry Cinnamon  08:12

with with cobalt sunder and ambient or something, and fascinating.

Nico Johnson  08:18

Yeah,

Barry Cinnamon  08:19

not my cup of tea. I don't I'm not knocking door, knocking everywhere, but I'll tell you, if you're trying to build a sustainable solar business, it's not by pounding on the door and persuading people to buy something. It's getting them to buy something reasonably that they'll repeat.

Barry Cinnamon  08:34

So

Nico Johnson  08:37

if we want to start lowering these costs tomorrow, what actually is easy and what's hard to fix. Why don't you explain sort of how you visualize all of this? This

Barry Cinnamon  08:46

is the other thing I want to talk about, and it's this is more of a concept. It's not a real product. It's just something that that it's really going to solve some of the big problems we have. But it's the concept is basically finding ways to make data centers pay for rooftop solar and storage, right? So they can actually get the power they need. And it's a zero sum game. Electricity costs are a zero sum game. If the rates are high, the utilities win. The utilities don't want low rates. They want to make the profits. They want to build as much infrastructure as possible. And there's a tug of war. Now we've got a third party, which is pretty brutal, which is the data centers, and they're saying, We want a lot of power. Utilities say we'll give it to you, and the rate payers are like, we're just going to get screwed. So I had a way of getting around this, but just this slide shows basically how power goes from long distance transmission to to the homes, businesses and data centers. Very rough. We all know about this,

Barry Cinnamon  09:36

yes,

Barry Cinnamon  09:37

but the utilities do this very slowly. It's very expensive, and now the data centers are saying, shit, you know, hell, we just don't want to pay for all this. We're not gonna be able to get our data centers in. So the nice thing about our industry, the rooftop solar industry, is they've done a good job of providing that power. This is a graph that shows what, what the trend line was for demand. Yeah, of you know. On the grid

Nico Johnson  10:00

in California,

Barry Cinnamon  10:01

in California. And then what actually

Nico Johnson  10:03

happened?

Barry Cinnamon  10:03

Yeah,

Nico Johnson  10:03

and what actually

Barry Cinnamon  10:04

happened? Fascinating, 15 gigawatts. We somehow found 15 gigawatts of extra solar.

Nico Johnson  10:08

That's an

Barry Cinnamon  10:09

extra power, and that came from rooftop solar. So it shows that

Nico Johnson  10:12

entirely rooftop

Barry Cinnamon  10:13

solar. Well, that's, that's my understanding, so entirely rooftop solar, where? And, you know, the demand kind of spike coming down. So basically, what happened is that extra capacity was filled in. Yeah, not big power plants, but just came filled.

Barry Cinnamon  10:24

So let's

Nico Johnson  10:25

do

Barry Cinnamon  10:25

through. DG, so let's kind of look at an example of this. So let's pretend this. This jar over here is the capacity of the grid. And, you know, hold that for me, because I hold I'm going to fill this

Nico Johnson  10:36

up with I'm going to hold the jar.

Barry Cinnamon  10:38

And these walnuts are power plants, and now the grid is full. This is all we can fit

Nico Johnson  10:44

power power, yep, now we can't generate any more electricity.

Barry Cinnamon  10:47

Yeah. And what are you going to do? Can't cram more in? Well, there is a way. The way is, if you have lots of little power plants that that literally cost peanuts here, shake that up. Shake that up. A little little bit for me, there we go. Get it in there. Get it in there. Glad I had lunch. You'd be making me hungry.

Barry Cinnamon  11:04

All right,

Nico Johnson  11:06

just like real life, a few power plants didn't make

Barry Cinnamon  11:09

it all right, we've doubled the capacity of the grid.

Nico Johnson  11:13

That's magical,

Barry Cinnamon  11:14

just with peanuts, with small power plants. So now let's take that same concept with real power plants nuts and rooftop solar and storage,

Barry Cinnamon  11:24

right?

Barry Cinnamon  11:24

And let's use that. And so the concept here is to have the data centers pay for the peanuts. Yes, the peanuts payments go directly to the homes and businesses got it that want solar, and that's going to provide all that extra power they want. You got to remember, the data centers are just like, Who do I write a check to to get this to happen? Yeah, and if they're able to write checks through the utility billing system, probably with CCAs, this thing can happen. So that's the concept. I'm not going to go through all the other details. It's set up so that the residential customers get a fast payback, less than five years, right? Commercial customers even faster, 3.8 positive cash flow, because they're getting money from the data centers and plus they save.

Nico Johnson  12:03

Explain to me, explain to me how the money transaction works, though,

Barry Cinnamon  12:06

that's the tricky thing. That's why this that's that's why this hasn't happened. So the way this transaction is going to work is the data centers will pay behind the meeting feeder, behind the meter, feeding

Nico Johnson  12:17

tariff, okay,

Barry Cinnamon  12:18

and they're going to pay that to their homes and businesses.

Nico Johnson  12:22

Okay? And what is the incentive to the data center to pay the behind the meter feed in tariff?

Barry Cinnamon  12:27

The incentive is, there's two, there's three. There's actually three incentives. First they're able to get that power and capacity for

Nico Johnson  12:35

buying it.

Barry Cinnamon  12:36

Yeah, they get it for $1 a watt, instead of, if they were to go through its standard power plant process. It's $5 a watt. They get it in two years, two years, because these things, these these nuts, Go in fast,

Nico Johnson  12:48

but it, this has, it has to be controllable load. Yes. Okay, so VPP,

Barry Cinnamon  12:53

yep.

Barry Cinnamon  12:54

It would be dispatchable. Power from the battery. This

Nico Johnson  12:57

will work in Texas,

Barry Cinnamon  12:58

yep.

Barry Cinnamon  12:59

And then the third thing is, they solve the affordability crisis. So there's, there's pushback NIMBY issues with power, with data centers all over the country, right? Because they just don't want the power to go up, and then, you know, the cost to go up. This reduces customer costs.

Nico Johnson  13:13

I like this idea. Have you socialized it in any, in any of the of the circles and powers to be?

Barry Cinnamon  13:19

Yeah, and we're looking at doing this with a CCA. Initially, they're interested. We're starting. We're next step is to talk to the data centers. Fascinating.

Nico Johnson  13:28

Probably

Barry Cinnamon  13:28

do this in Silicon Valley, because there's a few companies

Nico Johnson  13:31

there. I want to call Nick chasit up and see what he would

Barry Cinnamon  13:34

think,

Barry Cinnamon  13:34

yeah, this, this is an octopus opportunity.

Nico Johnson  13:38

Oh, yeah, it would be absolutely this is something that, I mean, it's a lot of companies opportunity, but do companies opportunity, but, yeah, octopus, not only that, but obviously he understands the business model of the CCA, fascinating. Okay, I'm so glad that you explained this, because when you sent me this deck, I was clueless. I was trying to figure out my head around

Barry Cinnamon  13:53

what does this mean. And

Barry Cinnamon  13:55

let's just go to the last slide, just to kind of cap it off. The data centers will like this, because it gets them fast power, cheap power, and they don't have the pushback because of affordability. Yeah, it's kind of a it's a win for the data centers, it's a win for rate payers, and we're going to get some pushback from that other party at the table, the utilities, but we'll have to deal

Nico Johnson  14:14

with that inevitable. Yep, yeah, we have to win the PUC,

Barry Cinnamon  14:17

though, but PUC, we might need legislation. And, you know, we're working with kalso on this, and we'll see where it

Nico Johnson  14:21

goes. Well, the good news is there's some examples across the nation of technology modifications

Barry Cinnamon  14:30

that

Nico Johnson  14:30

have worked in other countries and that are working now here, I think Vermont, Utah, Virginia, has it on the docket. Hopefully my state of North Carolina will have it on the docket, this whole concept of balcony or plug and play solar.

Barry Cinnamon  14:44

Why

Nico Johnson  14:44

don't you talk a bit about your exploration into plug and play and how that technology might serve, might have a faster path to market than behind the meter feed in tariff. So it's a fascinating concept. Anybody with a micro inverter and plug in. In, yeah, you can plug up, plug the panel, and it's great. It's taken off in Germany. Yeah,

Barry Cinnamon  15:03

there's a they basically have

Nico Johnson  15:05

gigawatts, right? Something. It's absurd, yeah.

Barry Cinnamon  15:08

And they've made it legal in Germany. And they also have a electrical system that's based on 240 volts instead of 120 Yeah, so it works out. So I've been talking about all the early companies, working with Kelso, working with Bernadette on this. And there's legislation that's that's proposed in California, in addition to Utah. And I think there's, like a dozen other countries for cities, a dozen other cities are doing it. I mean, Vermont

Nico Johnson  15:32

just voted unanimously,

Barry Cinnamon  15:34

right? So, so it makes total sense from in theory,

Barry Cinnamon  15:38

yeah,

Barry Cinnamon  15:38

there will be pushback from the utilities, because basically, the utilities in California, elsewhere, they're basically, you can't send back one single watt, or you

Nico Johnson  15:47

become a utility

Barry Cinnamon  15:48

or and, but we'll let you do that if you go through the interconnection process, right? And that's turning out to be really, really difficult, right? And you know, for for somebody just plugging something in and then spending $2,000 to get a building permit, it's just not gonna

Nico Johnson  16:00

work. And so are you saying that's still a hurdle in places like

Barry Cinnamon  16:03

Utah?

Barry Cinnamon  16:04

Yes, no. Utah solved it. Okay, solve it. They just plugged it in with a they solved it with a very similar law to what we're proposing in California. There's another but the real issue that we have to overcome is that there's some national electric code safety issues, okay? Ul issue. That makes sense. So Utah. Well,

Nico Johnson  16:21

hang on, why would there be issues with you all here? And Germany has figured it out. I mean, Germany is famously very high on safety and engineering.

Barry Cinnamon  16:31

What if

Barry Cinnamon  16:32

that's

Barry Cinnamon  16:32

that's a good question, but they're allowing it.

Nico Johnson  16:34

Okay?

Barry Cinnamon  16:35

They're not there.

Barry Cinnamon  16:35

I see

Barry Cinnamon  16:36

they have one reason is that they have 240 volts on their circuit.

Nico Johnson  16:39

Okay? So

Barry Cinnamon  16:39

if you plug in one panel, you're not going to create an overload easily.

Nico Johnson  16:43

That makes

Barry Cinnamon  16:43

sense. But there, there's apparently not as much pushback from utilities. But here in the US, you're not allowed to do that unless once we solve the UL listing issues which we're working

Nico Johnson  16:54

on,

Barry Cinnamon  16:55

then this thing's gonna fly. So the expectation is we'll get this passed. What's

Nico Johnson  17:00

your prognosis? Then, on timeline of like, major states like California,

Barry Cinnamon  17:04

there's no reason why I can't get done this year.

Nico Johnson  17:06

Wow. This, this legislative,

Barry Cinnamon  17:08

this legislative session, is being pushed very hard. Affordability is huge. So it used to be that the legislators in California would push back and say, oh, you know, it's not that big a deal. Now it's at the top of everybody's list.

Nico Johnson  17:19

Affordability, this is the answer. And people say, What business would you build if you weren't doing SunCast, it would be a balcony solar company here in the United States. I just think it's so fascinating.

Barry Cinnamon  17:29

It's, I look at it, I'm in the rooftop solar business. I install 20 solar panels and 20 kilowatt hour batteries. It

Nico Johnson  17:35

just feels too small. It's great for

Barry Cinnamon  17:36

apartments. It's great for little, tiny little houses. It's great for running an extension cord. Think

Nico Johnson  17:41

about the aggregation possibility.

Barry Cinnamon  17:42

Yeah,

Barry Cinnamon  17:42

possibility. It, it's it's there,

Nico Johnson  17:45

yeah,

Barry Cinnamon  17:45

I consider it a gateway drug to rooftop solar,

Nico Johnson  17:48

sure,

Barry Cinnamon  17:49

and it would be terrific once we're able to overcome the utility objection to back feeding 1200 watts, maybe because of the affordability of sugars, we can get 10,000

Barry Cinnamon  17:58

it's

Nico Johnson  17:58

not a gateway drug to the kinds of clients that are buying balcony solar and mass in in in the Philippines, in in Germany, where's the other there's Pakistan, in Pakistan, where it's literally like they're hanging it out on balconies of apartment buildings Barry,

Barry Cinnamon  18:14

when this is in Costco for, you know, 500 bucks, then everywhere.

Nico Johnson  18:19

So your point is, how you gonna start a business that where Costco is your

Barry Cinnamon  18:23

competitor? Well,

Barry Cinnamon  18:24

Costco is going to be a retailer,

Nico Johnson  18:25

yeah, of course,

Barry Cinnamon  18:26

manufacturer

Nico Johnson  18:28

and Amazon, yeah, I don't

Barry Cinnamon  18:29

know

Barry Cinnamon  18:29

if it's going to be Amazon, because you got to move the solar panel. But once the solar panels in a box, Amazon could do it.

Nico Johnson  18:35

You got to move the solar panel. They're shipping kettlebells. What are you talking about? They're shipping. They're shipping. They're shipping Jacuzzis.

Barry Cinnamon  18:41

All right. All right. They can do it. They can do it. It used to be really hard when you have a broken solar panel, like, how do you fix it for a customer? Plus

Nico Johnson  18:48

500

Barry Cinnamon  18:49

bucks there they that's a tremendous amount of potential. And it, and it's going to, it's kind of like letting the camel's nose under the tent.

Nico Johnson  18:55

I think I love it. I think the better question that folks are asking, and to your point, you're doing, you know, 2050, 100 panel systems is, how does this? How does it scale? How does it matter? There's such there's such small systems. It's two panels, three panels, may as well be selling. It's similar to selling, you know, systems in the Caribbean, right

Barry Cinnamon  19:14

for, for a part, for one or two bedroom apartment that can put, you know, 800 watts of solar panels out there. Does it offset? It could offset 20%

Nico Johnson  19:22

20% Yeah, interesting. So we did an analysis about a year ago on the podcast with Karen Baron, and it was, it was fascinating, if the state of California would invest into this, and then you might, you might want to talk about Karen. To Karen about this, it would be the equivalent of $1,000 stimulus check to the family that receives the product every year for the lifetime of the product. Isn't that fascinating? It's a

Barry Cinnamon  19:45

good deal. Yeah,

Nico Johnson  19:46

it's an it's a fantastic deal. Barry, any parting thoughts on kind of wrapping up what you what are your takeaways after your junket to Australia to uncover

Barry Cinnamon  19:59

how.

Nico Johnson  20:00

How we can be more cost competitive.

Barry Cinnamon  20:01

Well, let's tell you the reason. Let me give another example. So when I was in Australia, I met with a homeowner there's getting the installation of solar and batteries put on their house. The solar was on the roof, fine. The guy pulled up in a truck looked just like mine. They're putting in the batteries. Crews looked just like mine, doing the same work. Tie in, very safe. Neighbor comes over and says to the to the installer manager, he said, I'd like to get a quote for a two kilowatt system and 40 kilowatt hours of batteries.

Nico Johnson  20:28

Wow.

Barry Cinnamon  20:29

I just my jaw drop, wow. Running the mat like that's, that's a tiny amount of solar and a hell of a lot of batteries on a normal size house. And afterwards, I talked to the installer, and he said, well, in Sydney, they're coming up with a plan where electricity, you can draw as much electricity as you want. In the middle of the day, it's free electricity. So you don't, you're going to charge your batteries from the grid.

Nico Johnson  20:51

That's right.

Barry Cinnamon  20:52

But then it's like, why did he want 40 kilowatt hours of batteries? There's an incentive in Australia, in Sydney, the incentive is $370 per kilowatt of batteries.

Nico Johnson  21:03

Wow.

Barry Cinnamon  21:04

And there are companies that are selling batteries for as low as $270 per million dollars per kilowatt hour. So the more batteries you buy, the 40, the more you make

Nico Johnson  21:15

it money maker,

Barry Cinnamon  21:15

yeah. And so. So what can we do? Well, first of all, that that's an irrational incentive program. But I think in the US, what we can do, and we've had it, and hopefully we'll have it again, is some kind of rational incentive program that helps. It's maybe a financing program. It's just, you know, another kind of tax credit, which worked really well, but we'll see,

Nico Johnson  21:33

yeah, well, ultimately, one of the things that I know you always are thinking about and delivering at scale is how we can lower the cost, tie those lowered costs to distributed energy assets and provide more grid reliability, deploy faster and enable the next phase of growth on our grid, and certainly in the clean energy enabled fashion. Barry cinnamon is the founder and CEO of cinnamon energy systems, one of the icons of clean energy here in North America. And if you didn't get a chance to listen to what was a fascinating conversation we had on the SunCast podcast, we'll make sure to leave the description and everything on this when we publish it online. Barry, thank you for taking time to

Barry Cinnamon  22:13

come out well, my pleasure. And by the way, if you didn't know Nico is the best podcaster in the business, I'm just like, a distant 10th or whatever. And I love your shows. I listen to them working out, and that the last one you did with TJ rogers was fantastic. Just keep, keep doing what you're doing. Thank you so much. Build the organization

Nico Johnson  22:28

indeed. And thank you guys for joining us here

Barry Cinnamon  22:30

live.

Barry Cinnamon  22:31

All right. Anybody want nuts?

Nico Johnson  22:32

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