William Brent | CMO at Husk Power Systems

4. Geopolitics of Energy and the Important Role of Microgrids in the Developing World

Transcript

Are you looking to become a leader in clean energy and an expert in cleantech? Do you hope to get noticed in the crowd as you pursue a career in this fastly growing industry? You are in the right place. Join Karan Takhar as he invites clean energy leaders to share industry developments highlight cleantech investment opportunities, and shed light on how you can increase their chances of employment in this high-growth sector. We will also discuss the energy transition across key emerging markets like India and explore partnership opportunities for the US private and public sectors. After all, this is the Zenergy podcast. In this episode, we will be speaking with William Brandt, who's the Chief Marketing officer at Husk Power Systems, which is one of the world's leading distributed utilities. In this conversation, we discuss everything microgrids, including the opportunities and challenges to scale this innovative emerging technology. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Mr William Brent. Hi, William. Hi! How are you, Karen? I'm good. How are you? I'm doing well. Thank you very much. Wow, you're testing my memory. No, they. I mean, my answer is easy. I lived in China for 15 years, from 1987, I think to 2002; fresh out of college, I went to China, had studied Chinese. So, I watched China go from sleepy only bicycles, no private cars, no advertising, no industry other than heavy industry those off state-owned to when I left in 2002 or this booming, you know. Uhm, rapidly growing economy that of course was all and during that time, I was mostly involved in media and entertainment as well I was a journalist and editor for a while, you know, but most of that growth that you saw from 1987 to 2002 was fueled by coal, coal burning. I, in fact, lived in an old courtyard house next to the forbidden city that I shared with a few other Chinese families, and yeah, I had a coal-burning stove in my flat, and so, you know, I'd go to the close neighborhood station and pick up my briquettes and come back and fire up the stove. and so, I watched, you know, an economic boom on the back of coal, and it was pretty obvious as well that the level of consumption is it was rising, the amount of waste that was being created, air pollution that was being created, water and rivers that were being polluted, you know, the list goes on and on, and it was clear to somebody who was part of that and witnessing it that that was not a sustainable pathway for China, and of course for the rest of the world as well so when I left China in 2002, I moved back to the United States, and then I decided to get into sustainability that quickly led me to an uh, a job with a global marketing services firm called IPG, where I started a cleantech climate solutions practice for one of their agencies that must have been around 2006 I'm guessing, and I did that for ten years. I've built that practice up for 10 years and had a lot of exposure to every facet of clean technology, transportation, housing, building in the built environment, renewable energy, of course, water. So, I had a lot of exposure to many of the different things that we're going to be talking about, and then fast forward to today. I quit my job and moved to Spain. I've been in Spain for the past seven years, and for the past six years or so, I've been working mostly around the issue of energy access in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. So, it's sort of a trajectory from, you know, China media to where I am today, but that was how I got started, was just being part of that rapid growth in China and seeing the desire on the part of the Chinese people to live a better life and what that meant for their environment and for, you know, the future of that economy as well. So yeah, that's basically how it all got started. Very interesting. Thank you for expanding on that. While you were in China, were you working in the energy sector?    William Brent No, no, I so I started as a journalist. I was a foreign correspondent for seven years or so in Beijing, and then I quit and started my own consulting firm focusing on media Entertainment, and I did. I was a partner in a number of stuff. I had my own company, but then I was also a partner in a number of startups that were all marketing, media, and entertainment-focused. So, music, film, and TV had nothing to do with energy or sustainability or it was just making movies in China. Basically,  Karan Takhar and have you visited China since 2002? And you left. I just left me here, like your take on how you feel that China has kind of evolved since that time as someone who's lived there for so many years. Well, it's complicated. China is not an easy country to summarize; there have been some really, really positive things that have happened in China. The government has been for their own reasons, which I don't know. Very progressive and forward in terms of the adoption of renewable energy right there now. By I mean they dominate the solar PV manufacturing industry, they are huge players and wind turbines, you name it, they're a dominant player, and you know, that took a lot of foresight on the part of them for their industrial policy there to think through that and promote it in the way that they did so, on the sort of push for clean tech and renewal energy, I'm quite pleased to see what China has been able to do since 2002. You know, probably the last time I went to China was maybe 2014. So, it's been a few years since I've been there. They are aware of you. Know we don't have to get into it but is the is the politics. You know, I covered the tenement square. Protests in 1989 as a journalist and I sort of was part of the crackdown that happened after that and then the reopening of China, and I thought, you know, China would be on a trajectory that would take it to where there would be more civil liberties, and that was the direction was going, and I think it's it's actually regressing in the past few years, which is frustrating to see. I think it's also frustrating for a lot of my friends in China to be experiencing well what they see as going in reverse as to continuing to evolve. So, it's a You know, it's a mixed bag on the energy front, you know, sure they're still. Heavily dependent on coal, but you know they've done a lot to really shift the global industry and the ability of countries everywhere to adopt solar in the way at the scale that we've been able to. That makes a lot of sense. Now transitioning a bit to your current work with mini-grids, I recently read your article on Canary Media, or you wrote that mini-grids could bring power to half a billion people in Africa, in Asia and that over the past decade, mini-grids have doubled the number of people they served from 5 million to 11 million. Would appreciate it if you could shed some light on what mini-grids are for those who may have heard the term but don't really exactly know what mini-grid technology is and Why it's more effective and impactful than the diesel generators that are commonly used as the energy source today across rural areas? It's not complicated, to be honest, everybody that we know, you and myself included, purchases electricity from utilities. The utilities somewhere or other have these central generation facilities could be coal-powered, could be wind, could be solar, it could be anything, could be Geothermal baseload power that's generated at a centralized power plant, and then they construct these huge transmission and distribution networks that have poles and lines going to substations down to homes and buildings, and we purchase electricity from the utility that well, some of them can generate and distribute, some of them are just distribution, it doesn't matter as the end-user was purchasing it from somebody that power, but many here is essentially that same concept, just shrunk down to a community, right? So, it's location-based. So, you have a smaller, much smaller generation unit, in our case, it's solar plus waste biomass gasification, which we can talk about a little bit more, plus batteries, and so, you've got a ground-mounted solar array, let's say 100 200 panels. you've got a bank of batteries in a control room, and then you from the station, you've got the poles and wires that you string up to deliver to local full homes and businesses, and then those homes and businesses purchased that power from the mini great developer owner operator, which in this case is in in in my case it's husk power systems, the company I work with so you. Can sort of pick a different technology. Depending on where you are, you can decide that you want to. Just use solar and batteries, which a lot of people have done. We also use biomass, so in India, for example, where we started, there's a lot of rice farming, and that rice farming produces a lot of waste products, in this case with rice husks, right? Nobody eats the rice house. You have to separate the husk from the grain, and what do you do with that house? Most people just burn it, and it goes up into the air, is about a particular matter and a lot of CO2, yeah, it's house power the name comes from so originally what we did was we took waste rice husks, and we put them into a gasifier, and that gasifier created a gas that we then used to power a generator, that generator made electricity and you know distributed to villages where we first set up that business model didn't work as well as we had hoped. So, we've pivoted since then. We still integrate biomass into our some of our higher-demand communities; that's basically what many goods is. So, here's the story, the narrative that you see out there in reality, right, the narratives, what you said, right, the World Bank or the International Energy Agency says we could power. 400 plus, or nearly 500 million people with mini-grids, It's the most cost-effective way to power let's say 2/3 of the people, 700 million people in Africa and Asia currently live without electricity, right? So that's the universe, the potential universe that we're talking about. The reality remains to be seen, right? You're competing against diesel generators, which you mentioned you're competing against grid expansion, right? So currently, the areas that are without electricity, maybe one day the grid will go out that far and serve those communities, maybe it won't if you build them any good there and the grid. Shows up what? Do you do so we're competing against diesel generators, and we're competing against the main grid, and that 500 million number is great, and it would require more than 200,000 mini-grids to serve all those people. So, you know, in an ideal scenario, that's all fine and good, but the reality is that energy is a regulated industry, and it's very politicized, and you're dealing with a lot of legacy institutions that are used to doing big infrastructure deals in the energy space, whether it's hydro, whether it's coal, whether it's natural gas and, you know, getting the buy-in from national governments, regional institutions, development banks, concessional lenders, commercial bankers, blah blah blah is much more difficult in reality, right? So you've got the in theory story, which is 200 plus many grades to the power of 500 million people, but then you've got the reality on the ground, which is much different, and so there's a lot of remaining barriers that still need to be overcome to get to that type of scale. We think it's totally possible husk power is, as I said, that the company I work with, working with their other many others, and we feel like we've already demonstrated that you can show a path to scale, but you still have to deal with some of those constraints that I mentioned.  Understood. As you mentioned, it would require around 200,000 mini goods to hit that world Saying target. Just to give Westerners some context, currently, in the world today, there are about 19-20 thousand many goods implemented, and when they're speaking about barriers, I know that in your article, you mentioned access to long-term debt has been largely absent in this space, which has been a lingering barrier to skill, Appreciate hearing your perspective on what the risk appetite has been for the development finance community over the last few years and whether you see that evolving today as more uptakes have been successful across the rural communities for mini-grids. Yeah, I probably would preface my answer by starting with the question of risk, right, and how the International Development community and the funders that are part of that community currently look at risk because the legacy solution is either, as we talked about, centralized grids or diesel generation. Those are both in most countries heavily subsidized, subsidized on CapEx and OpEx, so it's not just the capital needed to build the infrastructure; it's actually the money needed to maintain those the operations of those assets over time. That's despite the fact that the economic story around diesel generation is really poor, especially now with prices going even higher due to what's the geopolitical situation. So that's very risky, it's also very expensive, and you also have centralized goods, right? So, India is a great example; most of the governments, 90 percent, 95% of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa, are all mostly state-owned, state-run grid distribution companies, they're all losing money, they have been subsidized to the hilt for a long, long time, so here are very risky business is centralized grids and diesel generation. They're high-risk, and they're poorly performing, yet they continue to be the default for much of the development community in terms of funding. So, if you want to talk about risk, let's first start with the risk that the appetite for continuing to funnel money into these loss-making institutions or solutions and the willingness to still take on that risk knowing full well that for decades they failed to. Deliver on the promise, and that's ok for some of them because you know they see it as a public service, right? So, we're providing subsidies to these poorly run unprofitable businesses, but we're still delivering public good, OK. So, we'll look at the other way.Given all of that, why are these large institutions are still willing to find these entities?

Well, I'm not. I'm not a scholar, but based on my knowledge, I'd say it comes down to what people refer to commonly as the political economy. You know, you have a relationship between the development banks and national governments and other funding institutions and national governments, and those institutions are decades old, built around a model that's no longer fit for time or fit for purpose, right? Which are big, centralized projects that are not climate resilient and that are very expensive that could potentially be stranded assets in 10 to 15 years or less, but that's what they know, like generations of people who've studied engineering and studied international finance development, whatever it is, that's what they've learned when it comes to funding energy infrastructure. and OK, that's fine. OK. But so that that means what it means there has to be some sort of generational shift in the leadership of those institutions in order to fully embrace and take advantage of these solutions that are more decentralized like mini-grids, right? So, I think largely it's that relationship that has formed over decades between these two institutions; you got the governments, you got the funders, the development institutions, multilateral, etc.; they've all sort of coming up with an area of knowledge, whether it's engineering or finance or whatever, built around large infrastructure, right? So that's why they want to write big ticket items. It's easy to do, right? It's like, oh, give me a 100-200 million dollar project and I can move my money, right? that's which is going to give me a good performance review from my boss, and I'll have, you know, spent half a billion dollars, a few billion dollars on this huge big project and that's all I have to do If you go to them and say, hey, look, the opportunity cost is high because you have to analyze a portfolio of hundreds of smaller projects and they like, well, that's not really what we do. It's not, we know, not easy for them to get their head around; they don't necessarily have the skills to evaluate them and do the due diligence in an efficient way. They don't do it right, and so that continues to be the mindset that's the legacy that we're, that's the inertia that we're fighting against, but to go back to the question of risk, it's like so now mini-grids have come up in the past decade or so as a, as we talked about a great potential solution, very cost-effective to deploy, very quick to deploy as opposed to building, you know, extending the grid or whatever, the lifetime cost is lower than diesel, lower than a grid, you know, there's plenty of economic reasons that you can cite for, you know, the the the value of mini-grids. However, there is this on; there's still this, this very strange disconnect where because we're private sector companies right there, everybody seems to want us to have some sort of commercial viability. So, we're expected to deliver on a business that is a public service without subsidy or with little subsidy, certainly no op-ex subsidy like maybe some CapEx subsidy to help with building the infrastructure but then once you build it that you're on your own. So, there's this, there's this apples and oranges thing going on where the risk appetite for centralized solutions diesel still high, and people are continuing to pump money into these solutions that have clearly not worked; that's why we have 700 million people in the world still without electricity because those solutions have not worked. Yet you have another solution that's much more viable, much more cost-effective, and we're expected to adhere to a different standard and be commercially viable; why is that? No one can give me a good answer today; if you go to a Development Bank or some other commercial lender or patient lender, you know, patient capital social impact investor, you're not commercially viable. Why is that? Well, because we don't have any operational subsidy. So, we have to charge cost-reflective tariffs to pay back our investment so that we can do a sustainable business; so, either level the playing field, remove all subsidies from the playing field, nothing to centralized grids, nothing to diesel, nothing to mini-grid developers, and let the market sort it out, or you recognize that this is a public good, and you've come up with a solution that is apples to apples where we can compete against the centralized grids, against the diesel generators on a level playing field, whatever the however you level it, whether you remove subsidies or you equalize subsidies for everybody, that's what we need to do, I don't care which one it is there just needs to be a level playing field, and so there's not enough risk appetite for solutions like ours because people are still looking for returns that are commercial, yet they are funding other solutions that are so far from commercial not even funny, so project finance, you called it long-term debt. It needs to be affordable needs to be long-term in order for project finance to work, right? These are not tech startups. They're going to see a huge return in the first three to five years, right? It's a long-term play; we're in these communities for 20 years, so you need that long-term, low-cost debt, but there is very little risk appetite on the part of people today, partly, you know, to be fair, the industry is still nascent, so we still have something to prove, but you know, companies like husk, we've achieved scale, we've shown a path to profitability even without subsidy in certain communities, not all communities. There's a lot of talk about risk appetite, and we need to take more risk and do this, that, and the other thing the rubber has yet to hit the road on that, hopefully, you know, fingers crossed, there's a growing movement in that direction where people will start to take greater risk and provide not only long-term affordable debt in foreign currency but more importantly provide the guarantees that will help us to get long-term affordable debt in local currency because, in countries like Nigeria, there's a significant amount of foreign exchange risk, right? So unless you have access to local currency debt, that's a lot of exposure for a company like us, and that's not going to help a nascent industry scale, right? So, there's the need for risk, it's intertwined with a lot of other things, but essentially it will give us the project finance to build out this pipeline of hundreds of projects or sites that we've already identified that are just waiting to be built. That makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for providing all of that detail and insight. In terms of improving the commercial viability, do you foresee that over the next few years, capital costs will decline to a level where the commercial viability of these projects without subsidies just proceed as it could get to a place where investors will be more willing to invest in these projects, I mean, given that I do fully hear you on the fact that the legacy systems are being subsidized, so as this industry is in its nascent stage, there should be some empathy or like subsidies that go into these projects, but without that occurring, given the way solar costs of declines, battery costs are expected to climb, do you foresee like the technology side getting to an economical place in the near term? Yeah, So, defining near term and just on one point that you mentioned, you know because we're in nascent industry we somehow deserve more subsidy, just to point out again that centralized grids, diesel generators, they've been around for decades, they're not nascent industries, yet they continue to be heavily subsidized right on an ongoing basis. So, there's a bigger question here about the energy industry and its role in electrifying people in emerging economies. Right, it's not as simple as we're in a nascent industry we should get subsidized. No, you know. They’re their legacy industries that are still heavily subsidized. So, let's look at it with, you know, without rose-tinted glasses on and be clear about the fact that it's an uneven playing field, right? So, I just want to reinforce that point. In terms of, you know, commercial viability, I mean so husk was started in India in rural Bihar and UP that's where we still have the majority of our microgrids and our CEO and co-founder Mineral Sinha, who's from Bihar and grew up in a community that was, you know, if not off grid there, certainly, you know we created, and lectures were very unreliable, you know, his commitment is to create social, economic opportunity for people who don't have reliable electricity that continues to be the thing that drives him, and it drives the company every day yet we are a business, right? So, we still need to be able to show that we're viable even, you know, all of this discussion around subsidy and leveling the playing field aside. So, I think you know. We already have our; we're very confident that based on a certain profile of the community. Uh, that we can achieve profitability as Company, but the issue is going to be when you get into communities that are less viable, right? They have less economic activity that is going to require a lot of demand stimulation in order to make these types of solutions viable for us or for the centralized grid; either one, you're going to still have to do some sort of economic development demand, stimulation activity to make it viable. I think when you talk about those types of communities, then you're going back to the question around the need for some sort of op-ex subsidy; whether it's demand side or however you structure it, but you know, whatever the solution, there still needs to be some support I think that sunset overtime to give some runway that allows for whatever are drivers providing service to those, those last mile customers, you know a chance to build up the economies in those in those communities so that the whatever the infrastructure is becoming viable, right? So that's a long answer to your question on the technology side. I mean, we have done a lot of innovation in-house at husk on the technology side on the business model side, and you know we already have what's called the Levelized cost of energy. It's a metric for energy infrastructure to understand what its viability is over time. We have the lowest Levelized cost of energy of any good developer in the industry. We're confident of that, and we think it's now under 30 cents per kWh, and we think we can get it under 20 cents per kWh in the next few years; if we get to that, that will give us prices that are competitive with daytime commercial electricity provided by the central grid in India, to give you an example. We see that there's a lot, still, a lot of room for innovation and technology improvements to optimize these systems, both business model and technology, whether it's artificial learning, whether it's IoT, whether it's new types of battery chemistries, new systems integration tools, there are plenty of ways to see a pathway to below 2 cents else Levelized cost of energy husk is actually working on an industry road map that we hope to publish sometime this year, which will put forward some specific targets on the metrics of where we think we need to go to get on-demand generation and other key metrics that will lead us to a pathway of sustainability. So, you know, I think that there's already been a lot done. I think there's a lot more on the table that we can squeeze out of the system in terms of efficiency. So yeah, we're, we're pretty confident there's a good path for them. That provided a lot of great clarity and in terms of a little bit on the technology side, automation and the digitization of payment methods in financial technology. We will probably be increasingly important in order to improve the efficiency and the reliability of collecting payments. Could you talk about how that process currently plays out right now, like how you collect payments from the customers and how you foresee the financial technology evolving in order to alleviate some of those risk concerns on the collection front? Yeah, so I mean there's really no risk on the collection front because we're a pay as you go in business model, right? So, all of our customers pay the most. I would say 99% of our customers pay upfront, so there's no risk of default in terms of purchasing electricity. Just to answer the question around automation and digitization, that's a huge piece of husks value proposition in terms of how we can scale both on the supply side and the demand side. So, on the supply side, we've got IoT machine learning, we've got a digital back-end that gives us visibility across our portfolio of mini-grids at any near real-time that allows us to forecast demand, adjust as needed, demand by sight using those AI and IoT solutions that we've integrated into our business. So that's sort of on the supply side and managing our portfolio, and then on the demand side, we've also developed a robust digital platform, what we call Husky fire it's, and it's a mobile app currently on Android, it's not on iOS yet and that allows our customers to see real-time what their energy use is at any given time to recharge digitally to top up, if they use up their monthly allotment, they can always top it up as well. All done digitally, right? So, these things on both the supply and demand side are critical for us to be able to get to our target for 2030, which is to build at least 5000 Mini-grid well; there's no way that you can manage that desperate portfolio of assets without a really robust and smart digital infrastructure to do so both on supply and demand. So, we're doing some really cool stuff on both sides, and then, you know to get to your question around default and the financial viability of our customers, one of the other interesting aspects of our business is we've integrated appliance sales into our business model, right? Our customers or other people who are in our service area who might not be our customers can purchase energy-efficient appliances for the household or for commercial businesses and if they don't have the money to pay for it upfront, we will provide credit finance for them to do pay over overtime that allows us to also start to build financial profiles of many of these customers which is in this In and of itself a valuable asset to be building that we can also, we think monetize for the company just from a business perspective, we can monetize it, but also add on additional layers of services to what we provide that will give livelihood improvements more economic and social opportunity to the communities that we're serving as well whether that's clean water, clean drinking water, for health care services, immobility, you know, there's a bunch of different things that we can build on top of the energy services that we're providing that may also lead to additional financial interactions with the communities where we're working. So, you know, we feel like that's a really important aspect of our business that a lot of other companies don't have yet, and we see, uh, you know, really nice uptake starting in India, and that'll be rolled out to other markets as well. Amazing, And I feel like that also helps the community lift itself up through providing those productive use appliances and giving them economic generation potential; that kind of leads into my next question, which is around the decentralized nature of mini-grid technology and how that enables communities to become one more climate resilient and adaptive and two, also more self-sufficient as we see play out with like the Russia and Ukraine situation, providing insight into the ripple effects ramifications of centralized energy control, I personally like extremely fascinated by the decentralized application of mini-grids and how that not only allows communities to become more resilient and adaptive but also the independence and self-sufficient.

William Brent
I'll take your second question first. So, you know, independent, self-sufficient, I look at that through a lens of localization, you know, you see increasing supply chain disruption globally, putting pressure on grain prices, fuel prices, everything. My wife has a wine business and getting lying move from where it's produced to where it's consumed; there are a lot of issues right now in terms of the global supply chain; that is an irrefutable trend just by the nature that you know whether it's climate change, whether it's geopolitical disruption you or war, whatever, it is COVID, there's going to continue to be supply chain challenges over time. Right? So that points to the need to be more attuned to governance, national, state, and local. How do we create more localized economies? Not entirely. Not trying to divorce from the global economy, but to be more reliant on what's produced locally, whether it's energy or anything else. Right? So, for that matter, so but localization is a trend that will continue to increase over time, and I think that any decentralized solution like a mini-grid or a microgrid fits very well into that trend line because you're providing a localized source of energy that source can then help farmers move from rain-fed irrigation or hand manufacturing to mechanization and allow for greater economic opportunity for those communities that's produced locally, right? Jobs that are being created businesses that are able to grow and contribute to the local GDP of those, but I think that that's going to be that sort of reinforces the economic rationale for solutions like micro-grids on the climate resilience front. I'm sure you and all the listeners are very aware, but I just it's not it's worth reminding people that the places where we work, especially sub-Saharan Africa, are responsible for almost none of the global emissions that we're currently dealing with that are leading to climate change. Africa accounts for one to 2% of global emissions, but yeah, at the same time, they're also the ones who are paying the heaviest price. They are most climate vulnerable. So, what you're seeing anecdotally is that you know, decentralized energy solutions like microgrids, whether it's the, you know, the winter freezing in Texas or the forest fires in California or flooding in India or drought in other countries, the microgrid that's built locally, that's independent and much easier to repair if it's damaged and to get up and running if there's some disruption, then trying to fix an entire grid, you know, I think there's a lot of anecdotal information that's building that points to the role that micro-grids can play and creating more resilience and allowing for these communities to adapt to whatever the challenges drought, floods, you name it. Right? So, the husk is also trying to work with some partners to try and quantify that and move away from just anecdotal information and actually do a better job of measuring what those adaptation methods are by installing microgrids. So, what's the benefit to a community from the heat stress perspective? What's the benefit from the community, from, you know, other climate shocks that are going to be affecting those communities, whether it's access to drinking water or whatever, right? So, trying to quantify what those benefits are to adaptation is also something that I think the industry needs to do. Better job, and we're working on it. So I think, you know, stay tuned on that. I think they'll. Hopefully, we'll have some good findings later in the yearLooking forward to that end. We'll definitely blast that on my Twitter when it's released. Thank you so much, William, for taking the time. I really appreciate everything that you had to say and learned so much from this conversation. If you have any last remarks that you'd like to get out there that maybe I didn't ask about or anything that you feel that it's important to share? That's great. Well, appreciate it. You know, it's always fun for me to step back from my day-to-day work and have a chance to have a deeper conversation on real issues. So, I appreciate the opportunity, and I'm really grateful. Yeah, One thing I would just lend with is, you know, I might talk about a generational shift, right, or general generational transition along with the energy transition. This is always a message that I stress, along with the energy transition that's going on globally, there needs to be a generational transition. So that's why seeing people like yourself coming up, we need more of you, times 1000, you know, because without that generational change, this political economy that I'm talking about, this inertia that I'm talking about. It's just going to persist, right? So, the message is too young people and then within that group of young people to women, in particular, to get involved because there's a lot of really interesting opportunity to do good, but also to do well by doing good, I think for me the beauty of clean technology and climate solutions is that you can make a valuable impact on people, hopefully on the climate but you can also earn a living if you do it well and so those would be the two messages you know Young people come and join us. Come and Join the industry as a whole and women, in particular, young women, get involved. We're trying our best to create more gender balance within the husk, but also to better serve women entrepreneurs who are within our service area is something that's very important to us as a company. So that would be, those are my two parting shots, young people will get on, get involved, young women especially. Thank you. Thank you so much. Honestly, I've never heard it put together so well. Can do good, but you can do well by doing good. When people ask me why I want to get into this space that's kind of what I'm trying to say but have never found the words for it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, sure. My pleasure. I probably stole it from somebody, so it's not my original thought, but yeah, share, share far and wide. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed the episode. Check out the episode description or show notes for more information on our guests. See you next time.

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