Anthony Carroll  00:00

What if modules and trackers could be delivered automatically to site, installed automatically, QA, QC automatically, and you could work 24/7 to build a gigawatt of PV in less than nine months from start, and then things start getting really, really interesting.

 Nico Johnson  00:29

Anthony Carroll was one of the early pioneers in the industry, helped bring power electronics to the US market, was one of the early team members, and ultimately president of Powell, one of the battery pioneers, and then he left the industry, as so many do, and needed a break from the solar coaster. Anthony is back, and he's back in a big way today. We're going to talk a little bit about what he's up to, what he learned in his hiatus, and why faster, more reliable, safer is the new mantra for the construction industry, as we, as we hurdle head forward towards automation. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to give us the only non-enabled resource you've got. Of course, that is your time. If you're new here, I promise this is worth sticking around for, as are the more than 900 episodes of pioneers, clean energy founders, and fighters on the front lines of the energy transition. Just like today's guest, Anthony Carroll. Welcome. Thanks,

 Anthony Carroll  01:35

Nico. That was great. You made me feel very proud, and also very old, looking back at more than 20 years in the industry, but I think you, you summarized it to perfection. We started this industry, I think you were also there.

 Nico Johnson  01:51

Yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  01:51

and you should be proud.

 Nico Johnson  01:52

Thank you.

 Anthony Carroll  01:52

We went through, we've been through a lot, yeah, to get to where we are today. We've supported a lot of companies, we've built a lot of projects. I am very proud of what we have achieved as an industry.

 Nico Johnson  02:04

Yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  02:04

in the last two decades, and like you said, I needed a break.

 Nico Johnson  02:08

Yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  02:08

I went over to the construction industry with no less than Lennar, one of the largest home builders in the US.

 Nico Johnson  02:15

Yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  02:16

home building as the connecting tissue of the American dream, right? Energy should be the connecting tissue of the new American dream.

 Nico Johnson  02:26

Yeah, it's one of those truths that one of the last things people will default on is their utility bill, right?

 Anthony Carroll  02:33

That's true. That is true.

 Nico Johnson  02:34

Electricity has become the thing we can't go without, not just the air conditioning, but the refrigeration you were early in helping some of the Iberian companies like Power Electronics scale to the Americas. What did you learn in those early days about scaling up a company that was not necessarily first to market

 Anthony Carroll  03:01

well, if you allow me, I would like to start by saying a few words about Spain and Spanish companies. Fantastic. I was a result of public education in Spain. I could not afford private tuition. I was scholarship through my entire career, including my MBA. I owe everything to Spain, and I also owe everything to power electronics. It was a family-owned company. They welcomed me like another member of the family, and yes, we took that Spanish local company out of Valencia to what now recently published 1.4 $1.5 billion dollars in revenue, and I remember being basically working out of small office slash garage selling variable speed drives, not even solar inverters, yet 20 plus years ago, and it really does fill me with pride, and it says something about this industry, anything is possible with talent, hard work, and faith.

 Nico Johnson  04:06

Yeah, a lot of people in those days didn't necessarily believe in power electronics. How did you instill belief in a company and a product that in many ways folks were unsure they were ready to test it on the real thing,

 Anthony Carroll  04:24

that's a great question, and honestly, let me tie it to FTC. Some people today, right, of course, have doubts about the scale, and is FTC going to become one of the top, top tracker vendors globally? And what I learned back at Power Electronics, it's a combination of a few things. One, you need a good product, like I can try to sell anything, and you know me well enough, I will do my best to praise all the virtues of a company, a product, a strategy, but but you need a foundation, you need a pillar, you need a good product that works. We have. Power electronics, we had a good inverter,

 Nico Johnson  05:02

yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  05:02

and it was, it was working, and when one customer would try it, they would appreciate the service, they would appreciate the product, but I think the other thing is America loves a good story, and this industry is full of incredible companies with incredible leaders that have built incredible stories, so at Power Electronics for me it was, look, it's just me, I'm here. I visited you recently, spoke to Ahmad at Sun Edison, I visited Sun Edison as one of the first customers, and said I will give you the best inverter in the market at the best price, and I remember they told me, but you don't even have a UO certification, and I said, but I will,

 Nico Johnson  05:48

yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  05:48

trust me, I will. So I went back to Spain, I had a homework, a list of things, backpack full of dreams,

 Nico Johnson  05:56

yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  05:56

we certified that inverter, and now it's the number one power conversion supplier in the US.

 Nico Johnson  06:04

Wow, yeah, that is for them, good for them. And, and you built the foundation there. I did my best. Yeah, yeah. So, one thing I hear there is you have to be able to find customers who will, who will make that trade. They become believers, not in the product, but in the person, and then they give up, they trade some percentage of their portfolio on that trust.

 Anthony Carroll  06:30

Yes, and this is what I think makes this industry magical. If you look at suppliers, vendors, VPCs, developers of different stages of the solar and now also battery industry, there's always stories about companies that trusted other companies because of the leadership. Even in the tracking world, there's incredible leadership, right? And I admire that leadership, and I look into that mirror, say, what can we do like them, what can I do like them, how can I deliver that that confidence and that trust, and you trust people the same way you trust people in your job. I trust people in my company. It's a lot about trust, and I think customers know I am not perfect, but if I make a commitment one way or another, we will deliver.

 Nico Johnson  07:22

You've been through a lot of early stage product cycles, famous failures, famous successes. I mean, the biggest battery deal in the US at a time was a Powell and deal in London, yet for all of the glory, being first ended up with a lot of arrows in the back of that company, it was

 Anthony Carroll  07:46

yes, the most gift and a curse,

 Nico Johnson  07:48

yeah, gifts and a curse. What did you learn through the Powell growth, and or sort of rise and fall, as it were? If you listen to the episode I had with a mod, then hopefully you can, you can channel. I thought it was really gracious of him and Jager to talk about the rise of false sun-enerson. Yes. What do you feel like you can share with the team at FTC, a company that has that was birthed from sun-net, that that you learned through the trial and tribulation and the fire of building what became arguably the best battery company in America.

 Anthony Carroll  08:24

I believe that, and I believe it was, and I believe it. It still should be, but it's not like you said. So, why? What can I bring from that story that helps not just FTC but every manufacturing company in the industry.

 Nico Johnson  08:42

Yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  08:42

I am a firm believer that we all need to succeed in order for this industry to thrive. I don't like the idea of, well, I don't want my competition to succeed. I'm the only one that should succeed. That's that's failure, because it won't, it won't help the industry. I learned that number one, the dream is not enough.

 Nico Johnson  09:03

Yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  09:04

like you can grow, you can build projects, but you need to follow that with extreme attention to detail. Execution is harder than selling the first project. Executed, building the biggest battery in the world in Australia,

 Nico Johnson  09:18

yeah, is

 Anthony Carroll  09:19

harder than selling the biggest battery in the world, right, Australia, right, and that's that's something that companies need to learn, and then I think last but not least, you need to keep going, I think when companies take a pause to focus on execution, which is something that Ahmad and Jigger talked about the markets and the currency and the investors and how all of that game kind of started that domino effect. Powin had a little bit of this. Powin suddenly attracted so much interest, so much capital. GIC came in, we had the Trilantic, Green Belt, we had EIP, so much interest. And at a time where, in my mind, and this is what Power Electronics did, you need to keep growing, you need to go on to the next frontier, next geography, next project, and sometimes when you slow down such a massive machine, you get into a glitch, and that glitch is when you're executing a massive project and you have financial turmoil, the cost of lithium carbonate. Yeah, which we were watching those graphs every day, right? Go up and down 20 30%

 Nico Johnson  10:28

Yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  10:30

that's that's what happened to power. Now got caught in the perfect storm.

 Nico Johnson  10:34

You took an opportunity, maybe it's a sabbatical, but you didn't take lack of sabbatical. Certainly did not take that off.

 Anthony Carroll  10:41

No,

 Nico Johnson  10:42

but you took a hiatus from the industry. You went to Vive, a company that is backed, spun out of Lennar, to create sort of modular homes, prefab, tiny homes, so to speak. Yep, is fascinating because it was all pre-wired, it was latest technology, it was truly construction manufacturing at scale. Yep. What do you come away from that experience adding to your executive toolkit, and, and also, maybe what did you bring from the wilderness?

 Anthony Carroll  11:15

Definitely not time off. I think I'm wired that way, and Amanda, my wife, can tell you that I'm absolutely unbearable at home without problems to fix. So, I missed the industry, I missed you, I missed all the people that I appreciate to call my friends. It's funny how at work you don't realize how much of your personal life is actually connected to your job until you change your job, and then all of these people are gone, and you miss them. Now, this is one, not to get emotional, but I think that was a big part of it. The other part of it was I learned that automation, robots, and factories will play a role in any revolution that we are going to experience in this country and globally, the energy industry will not be an exception. We will use robots, we will build different products in factories to then deploy, whether it's data centers, whether it's cooling systems, whether it's AI infrastructure, those will be built in factories with robots,

 Nico Johnson  12:23

yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  12:23

with automation. There's no question. Now, are you going to be a victim of it? Are you going to be a witness of it, or are you going to be a force in it? I want to be a force in that change.

 Nico Johnson  12:35

For some, probably it was out of the blue, and a surprise. For others, it was logical. You've been on the board for some time at FTC. Why is now the right time for Anthony Carroll to assume the role of CEO, and what does it say about the place the company is in?

 Anthony Carroll  12:52

I think for me it was a good opportunity. A while back, I had conversations with the board, I wanted to try something different. I wanted to move into home building. I wanted to lead a million square foot automated factory in San Francisco. That was exciting. After the job that has been done at FTC, I feel the company has built the foundations and the pillars of that. Clean Hill came in to partner with the company, we have some great investors, great shield hurlers. We have a great board, and we went through that process of stabilizing the company. We didn't have the right product. You remember this, FTC had to come out, they had to have a 2p and a 1p You had to have a five string configuration, you need a terrain following product, all of that had to be done, and Jan and the rest of the team executed a really good roadmap to get that

 Nico Johnson  13:51

done,

 Anthony Carroll  13:51

and then the board asked me, Anthony, you've done the 100 to a billion a few times before, we're gonna target 150 to 200 Can you, would you, will you?

 Nico Johnson  14:06

Yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  14:06

take this company to the next level. We need to expand globally.

 Nico Johnson  14:10

Yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  14:10

we need to grow. We need to hyper scale.

 Nico Johnson  14:14

Yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  14:15

would you like to do it? And I, I just couldn't say no. A

 Nico Johnson  14:19

lot of conversation and effort has been made to strip out complexity, especially in the infrastructure. You see a lot of vertical integration around some of the major suppliers with eBay's and acquisitions every other month, but there's still.. I get the sense there's still this gray area around automation and robotics, so talk about how you are thinking about the efficiency and effectiveness of trackers specific deployment in the robotics era. I personally believe that we're, you know, we've been watching terabytes, luminous. Another sort of, I'm not going to call it dabble, but sort of a nibble at the market. Yeah, because just like power electronics and everyone else, they needed someone to believe in them, right?

 Anthony Carroll  15:11

Absolutely.

 Nico Johnson  15:11

Kind of give me the state of the market right now, as you see it, for automation, and, and, and how you plan to empower it.

 Anthony Carroll  15:21

That's a great question. Nico, let me take a step back. First, I look at it from an ROI perspective, and I call this the innovation gap, the gap between are you going to deploy capital and time, which, as you said, is our most valuable capital, right? How much as a CEO, how much of my time should be focused on things that are not going to give me revenue in the foreseeable future? And you could argue zero. The board could argue zero. Apply that to all the companies, EPCs, developers, utilities. Why should we be talking about robots? Let's just build a project tomorrow, connect it to the grid, and get that energy, and move on to the next. I sat with a CEO, and I'm not sure he would like me to quote him or not, and that's why I won't say his name, but in San Francisco, I sat with a visionary, someone that we, we all owe a lot of where we are today, and he said, Anthony, it's all about I R R, and I said, Tell me more. He said, How fast can you build a project will determine how much it's going to cost you, and how fast can I deploy capital when capital is almost unlimited, but I need to keep it flowing. Yeah, and the only answer to that are robots, and I was, I was really marked by that comment. So, I started thinking, okay, how do we apply that to FTC? We are a relatively medium-sized tracker company with the great future. We need to be different. I can't, I can't be one more tracker company doing the same thing. So we have started investing, I have started investing my time. I'm not an engineer, I'm definitely not a genius.

 Nico Johnson  17:11

Yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  17:12

but I know when I see a good idea that gets customers excited, I know I'm onto something. So then we're thinking about the tracker, I've heard people say the tracker is a commodity, come on, the tracker is everything, the tracker determines the infrastructure, it determines the foundation, you need a geotech report to decide how much cut and fill are you get, how much your project is going to cost you depends a lot on the tracker you choose, so I connected that with what if modules and trackers could be delivered automatically to site, installed automatically, QA QC automatically, and you could work 24/7 to build a gigawatt of PV in less than nine months from start, and then things start getting really, really interesting.

 Nico Johnson  18:07

How does the ecosystem evolve for a tracker company that is not sort of the next power ATI scale? How do you position as a mid-market player? player in a way that attracts market participants, not the buyers, but the ecosystem that you're talking about.

 Anthony Carroll  18:31

I think it's power electronics all over again. It's really being able to give the ecosystem a reason to believe we are investing in automation and robotics. We have an amazing software and AI team, a team that many times I've been asked, well, you're the CEO, do you really believe we should be investing this amount of money here? And I'm like, absolutely, this is this is it, I can feel this is it. So the ecosystem will follow. I really believe if you have an idea, you believe in it, you have a track record, just like you do in doing what you do, and you say this is going to work. People will follow you, and the beauty of this industry, you don't need everyone to believe.

 Nico Johnson  19:19

No,

 Anthony Carroll  19:20

you just need two or three partners to believe, and two years from now, hopefully you and I will be sitting here, and I will be able to tell you that our automated robotic system combined with our tracker is being widely implemented in the US.

 Nico Johnson  19:37

How do you test and know which rich robotics partners are? How do you set the weight, separate the wheat from the chef?

 Anthony Carroll  19:45

You allow them to show you how good they are. So,

 Nico Johnson  19:48

say more.

 Anthony Carroll  19:49

Yes, you're familiar with a star, our facility in Austin.

 Nico Johnson  19:53

Oh yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  19:53

we have what I think is a beautiful test center where all of our customers EP. These developers, utilities come and install our tracker, they install modules, they use those time tagging analysis to compare to their current production. So it's real data at FTC. Let me tell you what our biggest challenge is, and what I think our biggest strength is. The biggest challenge is to get people to use us on one project. We have customers that love us. The rest need to use in a project. Once they have that data, I believe they will use us another. So that's why we use Austin in the A Star facility for this. What we're doing now with a robotics event at the end of June, and I know you're not a fan of Robo Week. We will find a better name for that. I'm sure you have one that you will suggest to us, but a lot of interest, excitement, many companies, eight startups. I will be unveiling the names here shortly. Eight startups will come to this event, and they will showcase everything live, and customers will be able to see it, and we will be taking investments on site. I'm just kidding, we will be showing the performance.

 Nico Johnson  21:13

Yeah, FTC Shark Tank.

 Anthony Carroll  21:15

Yes, sir. I love you there.

 Nico Johnson  21:17

Yeah, it sounds great. And I'm not opposed to Robo Week, I think they're, you know, you're building this sort of future forum, you're building a test track.

 Anthony Carroll  21:25

I agree,

 Nico Johnson  21:26

for the for folks to speed the industry forward, right? You, I mean, for all practical purposes, the claim of FTC is the f1 of the industry, right? Like the fastest to the fastest to the finish line,

 Anthony Carroll  21:40

fastest, most reliable. Yeah,

 Nico Johnson  21:43

so I think you could, you should stick with that. Like, who are the service providers that can, that can keep up, because really, like, if you think about it, the automated platforms are the pit crew, right?

 Anthony Carroll  21:56

That's beautiful. Yeah, in and out in three seconds, yeah. It is state of the art, and I'm actually thinking about something you have me thinking about something that we can partner on. Actually, cool. I won't unveil it just yet, but how fast can a crew assemble and disassemble a module thanks to a FTC tracker system? That would be a pretty cool exercise with and without robots.

 Nico Johnson  22:20

Yeah,

 Anthony Carroll  22:21

see who wins.

 Nico Johnson  22:23

We'll all be keeping our eyes on the company and your continually evolving career. It's great to see you take the helm. I echo, I think that Jan and the team did a phenomenal job of what nobody wanted to call a turnaround, but he really did a phenomenal job of stabilizing the business.

 Anthony Carroll  22:45

Totally agree,

 Nico Johnson  22:46

and I think it was really prescient, smart of the board to tap someone with international network and experience, someone with the grit and the been there, done that background that you have, you're gonna need it, but yeah, but I think we're, we're watching, waiting quietly, cheering. It's a, it's a brand, it's a fighter brand that has totally proven its worth to the few who've given it a shot. I like you, Echo, and with Next Power as a, as a partner and sponsor of the show, I agree that there's more like it's a rising eye lifts all boats, there's a room and we all need to collaborate. So my hat's off to you. I wish you the best of success, and hopefully you know we'll be able to get some listeners out to Austin to see your Robo Week.

 Anthony Carroll  23:41

That'd be great, Nico. Thank you. He's very forward to it.

 Nico Johnson  23:44

Thanks for taking time.

 Anthony Carroll  23:45

Thank you very much.