“I think people are undercounting the grid and utilities, particularly in AI world.” Shayle Kann · Catalyst with Shayle Kann

I mean, so we had a conversation a while ago on this podcast with Tim Hayden, who's now at Voltis, but was at Brightfield, which was talking about commercial industrial storage, not solar. But I think the bet you would have to make on CNI solar finally taking off is pretty similar to the one you'd have to make on CNI batteries taking off, which is basically like a twofold bet. One being that just the relative economics are better than they've ever been. In other words, you know, commercial electricity prices are rising a lot and solar is becoming cheaper. Question mark, question mark. But if that is true, then, you know, it just makes more economic sense. I think that is necessary, but not sufficient. And then the other condition has to be that you can radically reduce the soft costs associated with CNI solar. The problem with CNI is you're kind of in this nether region where you can't just like stamp out thousands of these things that look the same and automate everything historically like you can for residential. Your transaction costs are high, but you don't amortize them over a large project as you do with utility scale. And so you're in this like stuck in between zone wherever you're the worst of both worlds. There is a bet to make that you, that AI will allow so much automation that much of those soft costs can be driven down to virtually nothing. And then the fact that you're in that nether region may not hurt quite as much. So I think the bet you'd have to make for CNI solar to really take off is like economics look great, plus you can radically reduce the cost stack via AI and derivative stuff.

And the last question for you, we're going to do a catalyst version of Subway Takes. What is your hot take on energy right now?

Yeah.

But I also think that I think it's worth appreciating the decision cycles that occur in electricity and how, you know, it is not the fastest reacting sector because there is this whole process utilities go through with their regulators and they submit integrated resource plans and so on. And that those are multi-year cycles. So it takes a while. But once that all ramps up, once the gears are turning and the momentum is built, we can actually build quite a lot of new stuff. So I think the market does not fully appreciate that like those gears have really only gotten spun up over the past couple of years. And if you look out now a couple of years from today, I think we will be building more capacity on the grid in two years from today than we have in any year since, I don't know, since certainly before the turn of the century and probably a couple of decades before that. So I think, you know, give the grid more credit. Just you just got to be a little bit patient.

Nice. Well, those are all the questions we have for you today. This was fun. Thanks very much.