Unlocking the Power of the Sun: BoxPower's Modular Solar Revolution!

I love talking about technology that can make the world a better place, and today we are going to be talking about an interesting solar initiative, so stay tuned.

Today I have with me Angelo Campus, CEO and founder of Boxpower.io, a company that is helping to bring renewable energy to where it is most needed. They are building solar power systems that fit into standardized shipping containers that can be delivered anywhere. 

They got their start by bringing power to hurricane ravaged Puerto Rico in 2017, and now they are working with utilities to power remote areas. So let's talk with Angelo about how this all works and where it is all going.

Welcome Angelo

Click Here to Subscribe:

FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.

Occasionally we share links to products we use. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases on Amazon.

Transcript

Chris Brandt: 0:00

I love talking about technology that can make the world a better place. And today we're going to be talking to a solar company that is doing just that. So stay tuned. Today I have with me Angelo Campos, CEO and founder of BoxPower. io at the They are a company that is helping to bring renewable energy to where it is most needed. They are building solar power systems that fit into standardized shipping containers that can be deployed anywhere. They got their start in bringing power to hurricane ravaged Puerto Rico in 2017. And now they are working with utilities to bring power to remote areas. So let's talk with Angelo about how all this works and where this is all going. Welcome Angelo. Welcome.

Angelo Campus: 0:49

Thank you, Chris. Glad to be here.

Chris Brandt: 0:50

I'm excited to talk to you about this. I'm a big, uh, supporter of, uh, you know, anything we can do to cool this planet down at this point. Um, you know, considering we're just coming off of multiple hurricanes here and there seem to be more behind that and just a lot of environmental chaos. Um, but even more so we're, we're heading into, uh, the year. wildfire season, and that's another sweet spot for you. Um, but I like the idea of like, where are you going with the modular approach to this, and you know, just having a kind of self contained, uh, piece to this. But, Could you, can we start with, like, I know you've had an interesting history and, you know, this is a very personal journey for you, um, in, in, you know, making this company work. Can you talk a little bit about your, your kind of personal journey and your story and how you, how you got to where you are today?

Angelo Campus: 1:43

Sure, sure, happy to. And, uh, Yeah. Unrelated, I'm curious, how many hundred year disaster events do we have to have in ten years before we redefine what a hundred year disaster event means?

Chris Brandt: 1:55

I think we're going to have to spend a lot of time redefining that this year. My

Angelo Campus: 1:58

thoughts with the people of Florida and North Carolina right now as they, uh, suffer. It's rough. Yet another catastrophe. Um, so my background has always been in energy. Um, in fact, all the way back to a little kid, I was fascinated with energy and electricity. And I, I owe part of that to my community and my parents. My, uh, my father was involved in the solar industry for very early stage, uh, actually started a solar company when I was in high school. And so I was, uh, exposed to technology, exposed to energy. And I also lived in a very rural area. Um, I was, uh, 15 minutes down a dirt road, um, and not off grid, but when the power went out, the power was off and out for a week, sometimes two weeks before the utility could, you know, restore it. So I was, it was a common occurrence of my childhood to spend a week cooking food on camp stoves and eating dinner by only candlelight. And, uh, you know, this energy that I think a lot of people maybe grow up taking for granted, never thinking about where it comes from or how it's delivered. It was a very like real and material thing in my life, both seeing my father build a company around solar and experiencing the unreliability of it. gave me a really deep fascination.

Chris Brandt: 3:19

Um, yeah, multi generational solar person here.

Angelo Campus: 3:23

Yeah, yeah. And, uh, another little known fact, I, I'm here in Grass Valley, California, right next to Nevada city, uh, Northern California. Um, we have a very deep solar history here going all the way back to the late seventies when Uh, Nevada City was home to one of the very first retail locations where you could purchase a solar panel. Uh, claiming all the way back in 1979 at a store called the Earth Store, you could buy a solar panel. And that is, uh, to the best of mine and many others knowledge, the first retail location, uh, where an individual could buy solar. And so there's, there's some deep roots here. And I think I'm, uh,

Chris Brandt: 4:03

Yeah. And a lot has changed since that. Those times I, I, it'd be interesting to take a look at like, I assume that store is probably no longer there. The building is this, it

Angelo Campus: 4:12

is something else now, but

Chris Brandt: 4:14

in terms of like the capacity of those solar panels, they were selling the cost of those solar panels, you know, just like I would imagine it's just orders of magnitude different. Now they

Angelo Campus: 4:24

were, I believe it was a 12 watt solar panel that, uh, you know, is 30 or 40 per watt. Um, we are now. at 30 or 40 cents per watt for 500 watt solar panels. So it's an entirely different landscape,

Chris Brandt: 4:39

multi generational solar person here. Um, and you know, you're, you're looking at, you know, you're living through the reality of the unreliability of just having a solar panel. Cause I got to imagine back in that. In the seventies, when we're talking here that, you know, there wasn't a lot of battery storage and things like that. So, you know, like the intermittency of, you know, sun is, was a substantial challenge then, um, you know, like how, how did all that experience translate into you creating box power and sort of like, what, what was, what was all the motivation? And because I know you saw a lot of things going on that, you know, you wanted to fix. Um, and so, you know, that was sort of how BoxPower came to be, but you know, could you talk a little bit about what those things were?

Angelo Campus: 5:28

I had an incredible opportunity, um, I got a full ride scholarship to go to Princeton University for an engineering degree, um, first generation college student in my family, first from my high school to go to an Ivy League in ten years, uh, and I had an incredible fortune there to meet a professor. Who is working on micro grids and micro grids were like a new concept for me, but it was the idea of not just a solar system, but a truly independent autonomous energy system that used renewable resources, but to provide a more reliable, less intermittent source of power. And so, um, as a civil engineering major and an anthropology minor, I really had two interests. I had energy and infrastructure. And everything that went into it. And I was also really fascinated with places where energy wasn't historically available or wasn't reliably available. So generally, you know, the developing world, um, one of the really formative experiences or historical events that happened at that time for me was the, I believe it was 2010 Haiti earthquake, um, where an earthquake decimated Haiti's energy infrastructure to the. extent that is never fully recovered. And the, uh, the, one of the largest barriers to recovery efforts was lack of electricity. Um, more people died from preventable diseases in the two years following the earthquake than during the earthquake itself. And that was because of a lack of refrigeration, a lack of water filtration, and generally a lack of power. Disaster relief organizations shipped in generators. But then there was no supply chain to deliver fuel to these remote locations. And so it was a humanitarian catastrophe. And that was at a very formative times, you know, a freshman in college. And the professor that I was working with, um, had the idea to start a research group on Rapidly deployable micro grids, and it was directly inspired by the disaster in Haiti and witnessing these news reports coming out of another 100, 000 dead due to cholera and malaria. The professor, we have tools for this. We have solar panels, we have battery storage, we have the ability to productize and deploy systems like this. And so that professor started a research group and I was a, Founding, uh, an inaugural member of that group that was working on developing rapidly deployable containerized microgrids. Um, the theory that we could take these existing technologies, solar, battery, wind, inverters, productize them into something that could be shipped into a remote location, quickly set up and provide a source of power comparable to a generator But not dependent on constant delivery and refueling of fuel. So that was the inception of what became BoxPower. And I spent five years, uh, working in that research group with that professor before deciding that I wanted to start a company focused on that with the, the blessing of the university and the research group. And I started BoxPower my senior year with a very similar thesis. Can we make microgrids into a product that can be mass produced, rapidly deployed, and deliver a cleaner, more reliable, more affordable source of power to remote areas?

Chris Brandt: 9:10

You know, from the anthropology perspective, right, you know, and you're, you're taking a look at, like, for example, the telephone networks, right? We in, you know, like in the United States, we've got the POTS, right? Lines and things like that we we put up all this copper wire wired everything up and and like you look at developing countries and it's like well that's a lot of work to do right but you know a lot of them were able to leapfrog a lot of that progress by just going straight to cellular technology and then they don't have to lay in all that infrastructure and it's a much faster more efficient and effective method of of of doing that because that's a lot of work and I got to imagine that a similar thing is true about you know, power infrastructure.

Angelo Campus: 9:51

Well, actually, I love the use the term leapfrogging. That was something we looked at in anthropology of as new technologies enter. We play with a term called reverse leapfrogging, and that's actually giving credit to the fact that, uh, the work that we do here, which I guess to rewind a step is, um, our core business is providing micro grids in remote areas of the U. S. Where we are replacing existing distribution infrastructure that is either too dangerous, too unreliable, or too expensive for the utility to maintain with rapidly deployable microgrids.

Chris Brandt: 10:28

That's

Angelo Campus: 10:29

a good

Chris Brandt: 10:31

point. I was thinking more of like just, you know, Completely underserved, but you, but the reality is you're taking a look because I mean that's another aspect of this you're preventing other environmental issues to with where you're deploying these and solving problems that are that have crept up, right?

Angelo Campus: 10:47

Four years ago, we deployed the first utility owned fully off grid micro grid serving a rural community and just, uh, A year and a half ago, we deployed the first 100 percent renewable remote microgrid serving a remote utility customer owned by a utility. And this is a brand new concept for utilities in the United States, that they can deliver power with locally renewable source generation close to the customers. But I have to stop and give credit to the developing world, that this has become one of the major models of electrification in sub Saharan Africa. Southeast Asia, India. And so I use the term reverse leapfrogging. I don't claim credit for the idea of utility owned mini grid, uh, power gen and husk power and these really, uh, pioneers established and developed these business models and this technology. In the developing world, and it's now coming back to the developed world as natural disasters in this climate change, make that infrastructure, those phone lines that we built in the 1950s when labor was cheap and there are no environmental regulations, it's no longer cost effective to maintain it. And so we're now bringing models of electrification that were proven in developing markets to solve electricity issues here in the U. S. And that's what I call reverse leapfrogging.

Chris Brandt: 12:14

That is an interesting perspective. You know, we don't always think of like, you know, some of the development, you know, developing countries having, you know, technology for us. But, you know, there's a lot of really interesting things, just not like a water production, clean water production and things like that. There's a lot of actually interesting things happening in these places that, that, that would be very beneficial to us. Um, I think it's so so it's interesting like so like a lot of the infrastructure that you're replacing is really like super inefficient technology like because either like when you go to rural areas, you either got to run just miles and miles and miles of cables and infrastructure to get the power out there from some sort of centralized generation point. Or you're relying, as we were talking earlier about, like, really filthy, dirty diesel generator systems and things like that. And then you have that whole logistics supply chain of getting the fuel to those things and that sort of thing. Um, can you talk about, like, you know, the benefit of putting these systems in?

Angelo Campus: 13:17

You know, a couple stats to think about. Um, more than half of the infrastructure serving power in the U. S., so distribution wires, transformers, transformers, substations, uh, power generation is already past its expected life. Meaning when it was installed by about a hundred years, when it was installed with a 50 year expected life, we have power poles across this country, wooden power poles that are seven years old and rotting and falling apart. Uh, one of the most catastrophic fires in California history was started by a transmission pole wire. Rusting and falling off and sparking a catastrophic wildfire. Our energy infrastructure as a country as a country is crumbling and electricity loads are growing at unprecedented electrification of everything. We have electric vehicles. Um, a report came out

Chris Brandt: 14:15

AI. I mean, like, it's crazy what I'm seeing now from AI is, you know, they're bringing Three Mile Island plant back online and Microsoft has an exclusive license to all that power to generate for their AI implementations, which is crazy. And we're talking about nuclear all over the place for that. I mean, like, we are straining it. So I think, you know, like, when you're looking at stuff like that, uh, You know, where's rule going to sit in the hierarchy of needs, you know, in the country, right?

Angelo Campus: 14:47

Um, you know, an interesting stat I like to throw out is that, uh, for an electric vehicle charger, you've got level one, level two, level three, level two and level three are what are more common. Level two is a 7kW charger. Um, a level three DC fast charger is up to 350 K kilowatts. That is as much power as, depending on the home, over a hundred homes. So if you think about a charging bank of 10 DC fast chargers, which we need on every interstate, every quarter and every town to enable electrification, we're adding hundreds of the community sized loads all over our grid. And the infrastructure is simply not able to support that. And so. The way that I think about our role in that and microgrids is utilities, their technology hasn't changed fundamentally in a hundred years. And what I mean by that is centralized generation, synchronous spinning machines, transmission, distribution. And it's all radials from centralized generation and out. And so when you have an issue like capacity out at the end of the line, you have to go back and fix it all the way back to the substation or even to the transmission level, or sometimes all the way back to the generation level. And it is incredibly expensive. But now we have inverter and battery based technologies, um, really, I'd say, you know, in the last 10 years, but really in the last, like, five years of becoming widely commercially accepted and technologically proven. It's not science projects anymore. It's real vetted products that can solve these issues for utilities in new ways. If you have a distribution line that is unreliable, instead of having to rebuild 10 miles of distribution line at over a million dollars per mile, utility can now put in a battery at that critical customer at the end and solve that reliability issue for a fraction of the cost. Similarly, with electric vehicle charging going in, a substation overcapacity, say it's a 20 megawatt substation, and now with this new DC fast charging load, it needs 25 Well, historically, that's a 50 million substation rebuild project. That is a massive infrastructure upgrade. With microgrid technology, now, You add a five or a 10 megawatt battery to that system that can charge when loads are low, discharge when loads are high, and solve the issue in such a more elegant, uh, geographically sort of constrained way. And so I believe that we're in a, a new golden age for utilities of having a whole new set of tools and solutions to the problems of the 21st century of climate change induced natural disasters affecting reliability. aging infrastructure and growing loads. So I think it's a very exciting time to be in the energy infrastructure space.

Chris Brandt: 17:58

No, no doubt. No doubt. And I want to, I want to touch on the, the specifically interesting take you guys have on it. But before we get there, I just want to, cause I know we've mentioned some terms. I want to make sure people, you know, understand what you mentioned, like inverter a couple of times and, and, and, you know, I want to make sure people understand like, what is like, what, why that's important.

Angelo Campus: 18:19

Yeah. Yeah. Um, an inverter is what makes power useful. Um, so a lot of like solar is produced as DC electricity, um, batteries store DC electricity, but most of our appliances don't use DC electricity. Uh, what's in our house is AC electricity, our runs our lights. And so inverters are what take either that energy being produced by solar or stored by batteries and making, which is a DC power, which is a DC power source. They make it usable. They convert it to AC. They regulate the voltage and the frequency. They control it. They're a mixture between a, uh, a valve on a water tank and a, uh, a filter that cleans the power, puts it into the correct voltage, the correct frequency, and at the amount for what you need it. So they are in many ways, the brain of renewable energy systems and microgrids.

Chris Brandt: 19:24

Okay, so now I want to get back to, to like, BoxPower's particular take on this, because there's a reason why you're called BoxPower. And I, I really love sort of the modular approach that you're taking to this, and especially when you're talking about microgrids and just, you know, being able to deploy them. I, I mean, I got to imagine, you know, I don't know, we've talked before, it's, it's a very, uh, you know, relative to like, Energy infrastructure projects, the deployment of one of your systems is orders of magnitude faster than any of those types of things. So like the fact that you can actually, you know, potentially walk in and sort of a disaster scenario or, you know, the reality of this is most likely going to be when You know, power companies are like, well, I'm having we're having a massive outage in this place, and now we can't fix it. What do we do? You know, rather than having those extended outages, this is gives this is something that could be used to bring those communities back quickly, right? Can you talk to like the whole what, what box power is doing?

Angelo Campus: 20:29

It's a cool

Chris Brandt: 20:29

thing

Angelo Campus: 20:29

here. So. When we started BoxPower, our observation was that microgrids were a brand new technology, a brand new idea, and most of the microgrid projects being built were, for lack of a better word, sort of science projects. They were highly customized, requiring extensive engineering, testing, um, long, slow design cycles, longer and slower installation and testing, and You couldn't buy a microgrid. It was not something that was, could just be procured or purchased. Um, you needed an energy consultant and an engineering firm and an EPC and an integrator to put together this sort of bespoken, one of a kind system. And our mission was and is, uh, simple. We want to make microgrids into something that can be purchased and procured And deployed in the same way that when you go and buy a car, you don't specify how many teeth you want on the third gear transmission like there's a couple of options. There's, uh, there's different size cars. There's some, you know, different levels of, uh, trim that you might pick, but it's a product. Same thing with generators. You can buy a generator. You don't have to pick which alternator and which, uh, engine go together. It's what we are doing for microgrids. So we Pre engineer, standardize, prefabricate, and integrate these containerized modular systems that are not only the battery storage, but the inverter, the monitoring, the controls, in some cases the solar as well, mounted to the top of the container. And we have tried to simplify microgrids down to a product. A configurable, but a limited product. Option configurable products that can be purchased and because of that can be procured much more quickly. It can be prefabricated. We can hold inventory of them. So when it's procured, it can be delivered much more quickly. And because it's pre integrated, you don't need specialized electricians on site to put it together. It's a purely mechanical. Assembly, uh, I joke we're, I was wondering if they're going to sue me for saying this, but we're the IKEA of micro grids like, hey, it even comes with the tools you need in the box to put it together, um, is the approach that we've taken and because of that, it makes the deployment faster, the installation faster, uh, the cost significantly lower. It allows us to manage quality control and testing in a much more rigorous fashion in a factory environment. Um,

Chris Brandt: 23:16

I got to imagine there's economies of scale, too. If you can, like, maintain inventory, you can buy in greater quantities and play that arbitrage game.

Angelo Campus: 23:24

Ability to manage supply chain risk and, uh, you know, manage lead time and supply chain delays. And

Chris Brandt: 23:30

so that is Well, and, and, and, and, like, for people who haven't worked on, you know, like, big power projects, the lead time on some of that stuff can be significant. I mean, like, especially, like, with things like transformers and stuff, like, especially when you get into the big ones, I mean, some of that, like, the lead time's a year out, minimum.

Angelo Campus: 23:48

And so that was our approach to hardware, and so we have these modular microgrid products, and then we've expanded beyond that, because we realized beyond just the hardware, um, people needed help figuring out what, size microgrid they needed and what was their energy tool. So we started developing soft. Supersize it. I'll take a number five and supersize it. We started building software tools that would help analyze a customer's load data, optimize what size microgrid they need, configure it, and then give them a price. Like here, click order. This is what you need. And so that is our, uh, energy audit and system integration, easy platform, EASI, a software platform. Um, and then also realize that once micro grids are deployed, customers need help monitoring and maintaining them. So we're also in the operation and monitoring software business, providing the tools so that, you know, you don't need to like, you know, pull out your computer and command prompt into the system to figure out if your batteries where you get an automated monthly report on your system performance and savings. And so, and that's,

Chris Brandt: 24:52

that's super valuable because those monitoring systems. Like, when you talk about an antiquated world of, you know, power generation and things like that, those old, like, SCADA systems and things like that are just, like, really Really designed in the 90s and

Angelo Campus: 25:07

haven't been updated since.

Chris Brandt: 25:09

Yeah, no,

Angelo Campus: 25:10

um, all of that is say we have, we have done our best and continue to strive to simplify microgrids, uh, to make them something that is understandable, procurable, Replicable and scalable and that's, that's what box power is all about.

Chris Brandt: 25:26

And so when we, when we're talking about the boxes, the boxes are actually standardized like shipping container sizes. Pack em, rack

Angelo Campus: 25:33

em, ship em, move em around, intermodal transport containers. Uh, they are the, um, One of the few standardized things, we have, we have metric and imperial, we have fahrenheit and celsius, but the whole world uses intermodal connex transport containers. And that's what our systems are all prefabricated inside.

Chris Brandt: 25:55

People don't realize how huge an innovation the shipping container was in the world. I mean, it may allow for standardizing of shipping and rail transport and, and, Yeah,

Angelo Campus: 26:07

there's an incredible book. Uh, I don't remember the author's name, but it's called The Box. Um, how the shipping container made the world. Um, that I highly recommend for anyone who's really likes to nerd out about, uh, internet. It's very nerdy, but it's very

Chris Brandt: 26:25

cool story. It's a very cool story. And, and there's, there's a lot of inspiration to be taken from that because, you know, just like the, the act of standardization can change the world. And it seems like such a sort of bureaucratic, you know, mundane thing, but like some of these little things are so important. And I, I think it's, it's, it's obviously, and it's, here's another great application of the shipping container, right? So now another thing that also to, I mean, you can fit up to a certain amount of power in a single shipping container, right? But beyond that, you can. You can build this is a scalable, you know, brick by brick kind of, uh, technology. I mean, you can add multiple containers here and multiple boxes and just keep building your your grid, right?

Angelo Campus: 27:16

So I, uh, you know, put the word modularity is something we think a lot about. Um, yeah, I was, uh, an avid, uh, I would say obsessed Lego collector, builder, tinker as a kid. I, I, the untold hundreds of hours I spent playing with Legos as a child, I think really influenced the way they think about design. We need Yeah. Interoperable, compatible connection of devices, uh, building a system should be about combining the right set of bricks together that link together and turn into something greater than the sum of their parts. And that's the approach that we've taken to microgrid design as well is scalable modular battery systems that rather than for. Projects of different size, having to re engineer a system, our systems are parallel able, allowing you to interconnect multiple of our modular containerized battery systems to meet a very wide range of system sizes, ranging from, you know, singular, singular or small groups of customers up to community scale microgrids, um, um, Without having to start from scratch for each one,

Chris Brandt: 28:31

from the, like your smallest box.'cause it's not like I, I think I've seen like, the smaller boxes are not, you know, like full container, you know, that you're typically see on the back of a truck, uh, you know, to the, to the like that full container, you know, like what, what, what sort of power capacities do each of those have?

Angelo Campus: 28:47

So we have a product called the Mini Box. Um, I'm actually proud to say my house is powered by a mini box. Um, I do. Uh Oh, that's cool. I want wine. I do eat our own medicine.. Um. And, uh, the mini box was designed to power a single home, and you're right, it's not a 20 foot shipping container, it's a smaller dining table size, sort of palletized system, but it was designed to stack inside of shipping containers, and we can stack It's

Chris Brandt: 29:12

a fractional amount

Angelo Campus: 29:14

size of a We can stack 12 mini boxes inside of a standard 20 foot shipping container, fun fact. That's

Chris Brandt: 29:20

pretty cool.

Angelo Campus: 29:20

Um, And so that is our thing of is our single customer microgrid system that can be residential. It's also for small loads like telecom towers, monitoring sites, you know, small remote sites. Then we have our, uh, our solar container product, which is the 20 foot shipping container platform. Um, each one of those can have an output ranging from 25 to 150 KW and then multiple can be stacked together. And so that is your. multi residential to small community systems. Um, uh, use some ranging from a single to, uh, you know, 10 of those linked together.

Chris Brandt: 30:00

So, so how much did you say that the single one will do? The smallest one or the, uh, the smallest one. How much does that like for the single house sort of generation

Angelo Campus: 30:11

system? So that's a five kilowatt solar array, a, uh, 20 kilowatt hour battery. Uh, a seven kilowatt inverter and a seven kilowatt backup generator.

Chris Brandt: 30:25

So people have a perspective, like what, what is the power consumption of a typical house? It's

Angelo Campus: 30:30

a wide range. Um, I can tell you what the US average is, is about. 30 kilowatt hours per day, which equates to an average consumption of just over a thousand watts continuous average. In reality, it's not a continuous average. We use most of our electricity when we are home cooking. So typical residential curve is in the morning, everyone makes their coffee and then goes to work and then comes back in the evening and cooks dinner and watches TV. So you have this sort of, uh, Uh, double humped camel sort of load profile, but an average of 30 kilowatt hours per day. And so that smallest system, the mini box, it'll produce on average 20 to 25 kilowatts. So it's sort of on the, the energy efficient home side of a typical residential load profile. all the way up to the larger solar containers that, um, you know, can power five or ten homes, uh, uh, simultaneously.

Chris Brandt: 31:26

And then you can connect, interconnect them all too. I mean, I would imagine if, you know, you, you get like 25 out of that, you know, the smaller one, you could put two together, I would imagine too, right? To, to, to double your load, double your pleasure, just like double mint. Gum, right? Double your pleasure. Um, yeah, I, I think that's super interesting. I would, I would love to have something like that. I would love, I love the idea of the microgrid. I don't want to be dependent on, you know, like, because I, I think one, I would probably be more on the, the 50, 50 kilowatt, you know, side of things based on what ComEd sends me, you know, every month. It's like, here's you compared to your neighbors. You consume way more power. I'm like, I just like, I have absolutely no idea who's using that little power in their house, you know, cause I, I'm not, I don't feel like I'm using a ton, but I do have, you know, servers and I'm, you know, got bright lights and things like that. So I guess, okay, fair. I probably use more than I than I should. Um, But yeah, I know. I mean, so I would love. I would love to have that and just get off of like the dependence on com Ed, which is, you know, unreliable. And, you know, like I've seen the infrastructure from working on building data centers and things like that. And it doesn't. does not give me confidence. And especially when you look at sort of the, the broader, um, you know, grids of the U. S. and how they're all interconnected and how they work, you know, there, the, the, the potential for like, you know, sort of a catastrophic cascading failure across, you know, large regions of the U. S., which we've seen before, you know, is, a bit unnerving and as dependent as we are on power, it gives one pause. Yeah.

Angelo Campus: 33:09

Well, I'm going to, I'm going to disappoint you here and maybe disappoint some listeners then. Fortunately, microgrids are still expensive and they're outside of the cost of the average, the average individual. So, you know, like the small residential size system, if we were to sell them direct to resident, which we don't do, we work almost exclusively with the utilities. You're talking about starting at 50, 000, uh, for a, a whole home system. And like for most people, that's, that's a ton. I mean, it's a, we do spend that on cars, but it's.

Chris Brandt: 33:43

Yeah. I mean, like I got, I got a battery like that in my, my garage right now. Right. So,

Angelo Campus: 33:48

Um, but an interesting thing that we Made a choice to do is work with utilities.

Chris Brandt: 33:54

I will bring us back to the very beginning of this conversation when we talked about that retail shop. Mm-Hmm. that was selling low power solar panels for however, 300, $300, uh, you know, kilowatt or whatever. It was a lot. You know, as, as thing ki I as as, as things progress. they do become less expensive. And when you start at the beginning, I mean, that was a very expensive solar panel for, you know, a very select group of people who were willing to do that. And, you know, as technology progresses, it becomes more affordable for the everyday person and you start to see it in more places. So I'm excited about

Angelo Campus: 34:33

that prospect too. An interesting thing, an idea that we in sort of a basis of why we work with utilities is the idea of we all get our electricity bill and that electricity bill has an amount of consumption and a cost per unit of consumption, a cost per kilowatt hour. What very few of us ever think about is What is the actual cost of delivering that power to me? How much profit is the utility making on that cent per kilowatt hour? And what I think many people will be very surprised to hear is that if you live outside of a major metropolitan area, you're They're losing money on providing power to you. Um, utilities are a fascinating model cause it's a protected monopoly. Um, there's not a traditional free market competition there. They are regulated. Their profit margins are regulated. And in exchange for that, what they have to do is provide. an average cost of power to their entire constituents. And what that means is, there are constituents where it is cheaper for them to provide power and they make a significant profit on it. But for most rural consumers, where they have to build miles of distribution line to serve remote communities or remote customers. Their cost of delivering power can be factors or even orders of magnitude above the price that you pay for energy. And so that was what led us to working with utilities because, um, the commercial solar sector, the commercial battery sector, they are all, they're all growing, they're doing well. They all deal with the average cost of power. They are selling electricity back to the utility and getting some approximation of either the average retail or the average wholesale rate. We look for is by working with the utility, we try and find the places where the utility is spending The most to deliver that power where they are losing the most money to deliver power to a consumer, and that's often rural areas, remote areas, places with, uh, low reliability where they're having to send service trucks out regularly. And so by working with the utility, we work to solve very specific cost challenges within the grid. The spots where it is too expensive to repair a distribution line, too expensive to increase the reliability, too expensive to increase the capacity with traditional means, and that's been, um, our thesis of helping utilities adopt these new technologies.

Chris Brandt: 37:14

And I will point out that those costs do come back to the consumer in the big city as well. I mean, either as a direct cost of like, you know, a percentage of your bill that is, you know, a portion to those things or just in neglected infrastructure because they're not making enough money. money to, you know, fully support what you're, you're using.

Angelo Campus: 37:34

They're driving up that average. They are the extreme on that average cost of delivered power that is making it more expensive for everyone.

Chris Brandt: 37:42

I think there's another interesting aspect to this too. I mean, there's sort of the, you know, there's obviously a lot of regulatory issues in this space. Um, but you know, I know a lot of, like here in Illinois, a lot of the power companies are mandated to have a certain amount of, you know, renewable energy as part of their energy mix. And, and, you know, like the traditional way that utilities go about doing things is these massive projects. I mean, this is another way for them to address some of those regulatory issues. And do it in a quick and efficient and lower cost potential way of putting that together, right?

Angelo Campus: 38:18

Uh, I mentioned earlier we did the first 100 percent renewable remote grid project and it was a very interesting project with PG& E. Um, you can find information articles on it online searching for the Pepperwood Preserve remote grid with PG& E. It was nominated and received a number of awards. Um, the situation there is there is a single customer. At the end of a three quarter mile line, 0.7 miles of line serving them. And it was in a very high risk area where pg e to remove that fire risk was gonna need to underground that line. But the cost of undergrounding, the average cost two and a half million dollars per mile. Right? And so for that single residential customer, they're gonna spend almost. 2 million to underground lines serving a single customer.

Chris Brandt: 39:10

If you can even do it, because you gotta get right away and all that, too. Exactly.

Angelo Campus: 39:15

Rather than doing that, we took the customer off grid for PG& E. And because of its location in California, because of some, uh, because of their, the shape of their load profile being driven by summertime cooling, as opposed to wintertime heating, which because of time of day and winter is harder to meet with renewables than cooling. We were able to design that system to be 100 percent renewable. Uh, there is no backup generation. There is no fossil fuel generation, a hundred percent of the electricity being delivered to that customer is generated On site with solar that is only customer in California that is in compliance with PG and E in the state's 2050 climate goals to have 100 percent of our electricity delivered by renewable energy resources. And so we achieved it with 100 percent off grid system and the first time the utility has served a customer with. 100 percent year round renewable resources.

Chris Brandt: 40:21

That's a really cool story. That's, that's, that's something to, uh, feature on the website for sure. I'm sure you do. Um, yeah, and I got to imagine like PG& E, you know, that, cause you, you mentioned, you referenced that, that, um, down power line that started the big, you know, forest fire. Um, that was a huge settlement for them. You know, there will be a huge settlement for them. I mean, that's going to cost them a lot of money, you know, so they got to be excited about the prospect of not having to have, you know, all that rickety and dangerous infrastructure out there starting more fires

Angelo Campus: 40:57

too, right? And the terrible thing is everything we just said could refer to several incidents. Um, it is not an isolated incident and it's not isolated to PG& E. Um, no, unfortunately, it's not. A growing number of our most catastrophic wildfires on the West Coast have been started by utility distribution infrastructure. Um, and it's a major risk for the utilities, a major liability, a major cost for them and a major public safety issue. Um, and it's, Historically, people thought, oh, wildfires, California, yeah, we've been dealing with this for a while. I hate to break it, it's not just California anymore. Well, look at Canada. The entire west coast, Canada, Hawaii. Did anyone expect catastrophic community destroying, devastating wildfire? in Hawaii.

Chris Brandt: 41:49

Yeah.

Angelo Campus: 41:49

I come back to where we started with, you know, we're having all of these, Oh my God, that is a one in a hundred year event. That's just crazy.

Chris Brandt: 41:56

And I got to think too, like with these hurricanes, I mean, these hurricanes, the damage I'm looking at, they're wiping out all the power lines and all that stuff. I mean, at some point it's gotta be just easier to like pick up a box and drop it in a community, you know, or a bunch of boxes and, you know, like, You know, once you get the road cleared, get it out there and, and hook it up. I

Angelo Campus: 42:15

think I looked online, I think there were 3 million out of power in Florida. Um, and you know, to bring that full circle, uh, one of our first markets where we did a lot of work in, in 2018 was Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Um, yeah, was the first disaster that we responded to shipping our boxes into areas that had been impacted by the hurricane that wouldn't have their grid power restored for almost a year after the hurricane initially hit, um, we were there a couple months after the hurricane hit. with chainsaws cutting fallen trees and poles out of the street to deliver a containerized system to a school resiliency center in, uh, Humacao, uh, Southeast area of Puerto Rico. And so, um, it's a challenging time that we live in and it requires new tools, new strategies, new approaches to dealing with runaway, rampant climate change and an aging grid that was never designed to contend with these challenges, let alone, and it's. aged, uh, state of disrepair that it's in.

Chris Brandt: 43:23

What's next for Boxfire? Where are you going to go from here?

Angelo Campus: 43:26

We're working with utilities across the West Coast, uh, primarily in their wildfire mitigation efforts. We work with utilities to identify where their highest risk lines are. And the feasibility to replace them with microgrids, allowing them to either permanently decommission and remove the lines, or de energize them for extended periods during wildfire risk. And so that concept, born in California, pioneered by utilities like Liberty Utilities and PG& E, is now being adopted by utilities across the West Coast, looking at more cost effective ways to eliminate their wildfire risk. And maintain reliability for their customers. But I see that as just the first application of microgrids for these utilities and pun intended because there's a fire under their ass to do something about

Chris Brandt: 44:22

this distribution. That's, I don't even know if that's a pun. That's, that's the reality of the situation.

Angelo Campus: 44:27

Um, but there's so many other problems that microgrid technology can solve for the grid. We talked a little bit about EV charging, constrained capacity. Um, I heard recently that for new housing developments in California, one of the biggest changes is it can take years for the utility to get them power, to get them that capacity.

Chris Brandt: 44:47

And as an EV owner, I will say like the, we need way more. chargers along the routes. And, you know, some of them, you know, the problem is like when you get in the middle of the country, there's like nobody there, you know, so it's not like there's infrastructure there for people to, you know, light up or anything like that. So this would be a really great solution for charging. You know, the, the challenges, like you mentioned, EVs require a lot of power.

Angelo Campus: 45:15

So, you know, our company motto is energy anywhere. We're trying to decouple the geographic disparity of energy access. And I would, uh, I'd be remiss if not bringing up to one of the biggest areas of energy inequality in the U. S. is on indigenous and tribal lands. Um, yes, yes. If you go on the World Bank website, the U. S. lists a hundred percent electrification. And what that really is, is a rounding up of 99 point something. But that's not evenly spread across the population of the United States. 30 percent of Native Americans living on reservations Do not have access to grid electricity have not been served by the traditional electrical grid. And so, in addition to our work with utilities, we're doing a lot of work with tribal entities, helping them secure federal funding for energy infrastructure projects, bringing energy into these. Historically underserved and, uh, um, under resourced communities that have suffered some of the worst of not only energy access, but also climate change and, uh, um.

Chris Brandt: 46:27

That's important work to do, because that is a community who is, you know, who has suffered through a lot of, you know, bad action, bad decisions and neglect.

Angelo Campus: 46:40

There's a deep debt to be paid there that I think the US has, uh, not even begun to reckon with.

Chris Brandt: 46:48

Have not scratched the surface on that. And, um, yeah, no, I, I, I'm with you on that. Um, Super cool stuff you're doing. I love, you know, the story behind this. I'm excited to see where you go. I'm excited for microgrids. I want a microgrid in my backyard, but I'm going to be a ways away, you know, here in Chicago. It's not, uh, not, not the easiest, but, um. But I do appreciate what you're doing. It's very cool. And I love how you're serving underserved communities. It's a cool story. Um, you know, keep up the good work and, and keep me posted because I, I just, I want to, I want to keep an eye on where you, where you go from

Angelo Campus: 47:25

here. Thank you. And what I want to say is a shout out to the people like you. A solar microgrid may not yet be cost effective or viable for you in Chicago. Right. A heat pump is a heat pump. Water heater certainly is, uh, energy efficiency improvements, ground source heat pumps. There's such an incredible array of technologies available to homeowners under the new, uh, IRA and investment tax credit. There are rebates available for all of this. You can get a rebate. For replacing your hot water heater for putting in a more energy efficient stove, um, obtaining a renewable micro grid for your community, maybe out of reach of the average U. S. Consumer, but reducing your energy impact and reducing your energy cost in a way that is doing something positive for the planet. is something that everyone can do. So look into those.

Chris Brandt: 48:20

I think that's an important message for everybody to hear. So thank you for that. And, uh, thanks for being on. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Chris, thank you for having me. Thanks for watching. I love to hear from you in the comments. I would love to get your opinions about solar energy and box power. And if you could give us a like, think about subscribing and I will see you in the next one.