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What does it mean to electrify a fleet? Like how is everything going to be connected to the grid and what are all the logistics that need to be sorted out for fleet electrification to happen? But also let's stop to realize what the ultimate goal is.
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Which is net zero, so maybe it means not even having a fleet at all.
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In this episode, I sit down with Urvi Nagrani, the founder of Climate Solution Consulting, and an EV expert to talk about the future of transportation.
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And some of the benefits to fleet owners converting their fleets to zero emissions from job quality improvements for truckers to the impact on local economies.
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This is a conversation you won't wanna miss.
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So get ready to hear the facts and insights from the front lines of the EV industry.
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Urvi, why don't you go ahead and start off, tell us a little bit about your background.
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So I started in the vehicle electrification space about a decade ago now, initially with a company called Motive Power Systems.
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They're still around.
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And we came in with the idea of we are going to build electric powertrains for medium and heavy duty trucks and buses.
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And the reason that was really important is this was, in the day of Tesla being known for the Roadster.
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This is Pre model three.
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And electrification of vehicles was very limited, even on the light duty side, things like the Leaf, Prius.
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And so we had significantly fewer models, and when it came to medium and heavy duty trucks, nobody was building those as electric systems yet.
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And so coming in, one of the key things that we thought, and our central thesis was that if you've got a delegated assembly model the way that you do for medium and heavy duty trucks, you need to start designing power trains in a way that fits into that.
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So we started by the thesis of we're gonna sell electric power trains into this market.
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And we realized most people don't.
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One, know how to integrate the system, and two, don't want the regulatory liability of working with a regulatory agency and certifying their product.
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So they buy a pre-certified thing from Freightliner or Ford.
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They're not gonna do that paperwork on their own.
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And so if you sell them a system and they have to do regulatory paperwork, it isn't gonna work.
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So we pivoted into selling electric chassis for medium and heavy duty trucks and buses.
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Now those electric chassis got used in a whole variety of applications.
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So we were the first ever company certified to have kids on our electric school buses.
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So other people had made electric buses before, but they were not school buses because there are strict safety standards.
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We also did last mile delivery specialty vehicles.
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So everything from a blood mobile and a trolley all the way to the classic, delivery truck with USPS.
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And so in that time period I got to do a whole bunch of things.
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I did business development, marketing collateral.
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I was doing technology assessment workshops over with the CEC I did our regulatory paperwork and attended all these rule-makings, and so got a crash course in all sorts of different parts of the industry.
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And one of the things is eventually, the industry started changing.
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We had more and more of these products, more and more of these vehicles, and so I decided I wanted to pivot to working on the infrastructure side because if you go to any site today, there is almost certainly enough power for one truck.
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But if you're doing four or five trucks, You got some upgrades to do, and if you're doing 10 trucks, the utility has some upgrades to do.
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And so with vehicle manufacturing over time you start to see a scenario where it gets easier and easier.
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One truck is hard, five trucks is slightly easier cuz you can buy things in bulk.
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10 trucks is easier, but by the time you've gotten to, thousands of trucks, your cost per unit goes down.
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Rah, Rah, go profit.
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Meanwhile on the infrastructure side, every time you do a new construction project, the cost goes up because those things like permitting doesn't scale.
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Utility, interconnections don't scale.
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And in my perspective, once you got to a critical inflection point on, there's so many vehicles that we now get to think about infrastructure, that became the interesting problem for me and.
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When I pivoted infrastructure, I started out as a board advisor with a company called eIQ Mobility.
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And they were eventually acquired by NextEra, but they were working on fleet as a service.
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And so they built a tool that allowed you to compare what are the vehicles out there, what are the sites that are out there, what does their grid power or makeup look like in terms of its renewable standards.
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You're gonna have different emissions if you're charging off of coal versus hydroelectric power.
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All of that consolidated into one tool and it got to work with some really great people.
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It was a lot of fun.
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Next I was at Powerflex for a bit and Powerflex is owned by EDF renewables.
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They're doing some really exciting work on load management, so making sure that you get to use as much power is available within that interconnection.
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and spread it out over your fleet.
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I unfortunately went to Volta at a not great time right before leadership changed.
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So I joined the office of the CEO prior to the CEO leaving, which was a much shorter lived stint than I thought it was gonna be.
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And so this year has been a little more chaotic because in the last year left there and I've gone into consulting.
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So I've been working with a company called Synop, and I'm also working on founding my own project, which is a little bit more under the radar right now, and I can't wait to tell folks about it, but get it a bit more polished first.
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Definitely.
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Make sure it's all ready to go to market exactly.
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I don't wanna pre-launch it when it's not quite ready to be launched.
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I understand that.
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And when you're going through all of this process, you really learned so much about electrification and what's all going on in the industry and with the infrastructure side of things.
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Are you seeing a difference in.
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DC versus AC.
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I've heard that thrown around a bit as well.
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So does that impact the scalability of different installations for different sites? So there's a saying in microgrids that if you've seen one microgrid, you've seen one microgrid.
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And the reason for that is there's a lot of specialized tailoring that happens with any site.
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And so when we think about the future of the grid, I am a little less concerned with the particulars of, what is this power level gonna do to as compared to that? Because that isn't what's guiding decisions when people are choosing AC over DC power.
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It's not because, oh, I want AC power.
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It's not, I want DC power, it's, I want charging that fits within the available power.
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and meets my vehicle's application need and dwell time.
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And so I care a lot more about that because over time you're gonna see a difference in the vehicle types.
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The battery chemistries available, the prevalence or lack of onsite storage, the prevalence or lack of onsite power generation, whether it's through micro generators or solar.
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And the availability of power on the grid.
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And so that's this little dance that's happening on there where you are gonna see some sites where the best solution is gonna be, Hey, the grid's reliable here.
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The power's cheap, the power's renewable.
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This is fine.
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I've got a long dwell time.
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Let's just use what's here.
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You're gonna also see sites where.
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My entire fleet needs to charge in a very short window and needs to charge very quickly, and that I think is gonna be very much fleet dependent, not technology dependent.
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The technology is a tool to solve a problem, so it's much more important to figure out what is the problem you're solving for.
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That was very important.
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What is the question? How do we solve that problem so that we can, find the right solution rather than just saying, oh this should work, and go from there.
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I don't think it's one right solution, and the reason I think it's really important to realize that is.
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Every fleet does things a little different.
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Like a fleet is a purpose-built tool for a business problem.
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So sometimes you might say, for example, like if you were to look at UPS, sometimes the answer is, I want a different truck.
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But in Europe, they're using electric bicycles in some areas.
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And so sometimes the solution isn't even a truck.
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And so if you operate under the assumption that, alright, if I want 10 trucks and I'm gonna have 10 trucks in the future, but they're not gonna have diesel.
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You've already made a bunch of assumptions of, to move X amount of payload efficiently and cleanly.
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I need trucks.
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And I think there's some folks who are thinking about it that way, but I think a lot of the fleets are thinking about what does the future of mobility look like? Whether that is, if you are a urban planner.
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It's not just, all right, I need this many 40 foot buses, and it's always gonna be 40 foot buses.
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You might start going to longer buses.
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You might start integrating with ride sharing platforms for certain areas where route frequency would be harder.
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You might be considering autonomous vehicles, electric bike shares, scooters, and all of those are electric vehicles That can solve your problem of how do I move lots of people with fewer emissions and the.
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On the good side, you might replace multiple vehicles with one large vehicle if they're all doing the same route.
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But you also might distribute it in the other way of maybe the biggest concern isn't the vehicle, maybe the biggest concern is traffic.
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And so in the same way that DoorDash, you've got a lot of delivery folks who are out there on scooters, maybe that's more efficient.
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And I think keeping your eye on that, if a purpose-built fleet is trying to solve a problem, How are they going to solve it based on their purpose? Because the answer's gonna look totally different for a fleet that's, PG E versus UPS versus a taco truck and all of those currently buy some of the same truck types.
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That's super interesting for sure, because it has to be very tailored and you can't just think, oh, one size fits all for across the board.
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So I think, that's really important for people to recognize and realize.
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And you're talking before how now we've hit that size where infrastructure starts to matter because we have a number of adoptions happening with people transitioning to electrification.
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Where do you see, this continuing? Do you see even more fleets and more of this happening? And what rate do you see this happening in the future? So I think we are going to be limited by the utilities.
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Because when you think about a utility scale project for a fleet, let's use the example of a school bus.
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now school bus might have 120 kilowatt hours on it, and you go, okay, that's doable.
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If it's charging at a slow dwell time, it's there for, 10 hours overnight.
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Who cares? But if you start to put a lot of school buses, so maybe you've got a depot and it's got 30 school buses at the same spot.
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you've now put almost a megawatt of charging if you want them all to charge at the same time.
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So you either have to start thinking, okay, how do I manage my charging so that my total power need goes down and the interconnection I need goes down? But you also most likely parked in a parking lot that had no power.
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So you're going from nothing to almost a neighborhood worth of power overnight, and it takes utilities time to bring that service.
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And so you're seeing multiple different companies coming up with sort.
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Power that is a temporary gap filler, like a DC charging in a shipping container where the goal isn't necessarily, that's the end all of charging.
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The goal is how do I charge things here until my utility gets here? And so you're gonna see some of that where the utility is gonna be the long leg of the project and you've just really gotta get started as soon as possible.
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So you might think, I don't need power this year or next year.
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go, okay, if the utility takes three years to design that project and you need it in three years, just because you have not purchased a vehicle and you don't have a plan yet, doesn't mean you shouldn't be getting started.
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That's gonna be a really key part.
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And then the other key thing is gonna be.
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If you are in some areas like warehouse districts where everyone around you has a fleet and everyone around you is gonna need to charge, that entire neighborhood is gonna be constrained.
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It's not just what is coming into your specific site and on your meter, but it's how much power is in that neighborhood.
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And some of that is gonna be offset by, are you using your roof space effectively? Do you have solar there or not? Some of that question is going to be, where's that gonna fit with your other power needs? So it's not that your energy is just for your fleet, it's also, all right, I'm going to put more sustainable lighting.
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I'm gonna put some LEDs in there.
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I am going to have better insulation.
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I need more HVAC because it turns out that summers are getting hotter and if I need cold storage for my foods in this warehouse, I need more HVAC.
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And so suddenly you go, I need to combine all of those.
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into one project because they're all in the same site.
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And one of the things that's really exciting about that is it means that there's spaces for optimizations.
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One of the things that's very scary about that is historically you have a fleet manager who cares a lot about vehicles, and you've got a facility manager who cares about buildings.
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Those two worlds are going to intersect, and they don't always speak the same language, they don't have the same timelines, and they need to learn how to work.
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And that's a hard thing for, it's who can lobby the best, right? Who's gonna, make their argument the best and the fastest so that, they can get their point across.
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And I think that'll be challenging for them.
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It will be challenging.
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And I think one of the bets we're seeing a lot of people in this industry make is there's a whole bunch of businesses.
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Terawatt, Zim Watt EV who all have a somewhat similar model of we're gonna do fleet as a service and electrify a site, and a fleet will come there.
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And for some fleets it might be a better choice not to do construction on a facility that they might be leasing, but instead to lease a new facility when the time comes to get that power.
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There's other facilities that they're going to do that.
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Whether it's their landlords, somebody like Prologis going in on that, or whether it's, I'm such a big client that I own my own real estate portfolio.
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All of these things are happening at the same time.
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It's not one answer that the entire industry is gonna settle on.
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It's what answer is best for you, your fleet, and your site.
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And you could even see for a large company UPS or something like that has multiple different locations all across the country.
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It might be site specific where they have definitely, managers who have to understand, specific things about each place.
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And then they're calling in, consultants to say, okay, this is a good option for this site.
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And then they're calling against somebody else to consider this site.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And UPS is a great example because they have been a leader in the space, and so almost every EV company that is somewhat mature has sold something to UPS at some point.
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But those pilots aren't on the same site, and so you're not gonna say, all right, this is the site where we're gonna have all of the EVs.
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we're gonna use this site to test Motive.
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We're gonna use this one to text Workhorse.
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We're gonna use this one Exos, literally everybody who's sold a truck is probably gonna sell to them at some point, and they're gonna have a site where it's being tested.
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And then at a portfolio level, they're gonna compare the performance of different types of chargers, different types of trucks, and in the same way that right.
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now their fleet is diverse.
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They own things from a variety of manufacturers.
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That is probably not gonna change.
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I don't think there's gonna be a single source solution anywhere.
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Do you foresee maybe some other companies just observing this and then saying, oh, that one worked the best.
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Let me go use that company? They're definitely going to be folks on different side of the adoption curve.
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So right now we are in a time where if I were a fleet personally, I would want to be buying.
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And the reason I would.
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Is right now we are in the carrot point of carrot and stick, so regulators are going to be coming with a stick and requiring you to do certain things.
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So you can do it by choice right now and get free money to help you make that transition.
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And so your capital costs are gonna be lower.
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There are utility programs on your infrastructure side, and that is a really good time if you're gonna take risks and try new things do it because another fleet might have a great experience and use their fleet in a totally different way than you.
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And so the only way you're gonna know what works best for your fleet is to actually do that.
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And while there's free money, why not take the free money and do it at a cheaper cost and get those learnings before you're fully paying for everything yourself? Are some fleets gonna wait? Yes.
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And they won't have funds to help them, and they're probably gonna be angry when they realize that changing from one technology to another, which most of them have never done.
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For the last several decades, everybody's using the same fuels.
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And so if you've never had to do adoption costs of a new technology, you're gonna be like, ah, sticker shock.
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I think living in Silicon Valley, I am a little more used to the fact that, my laptop will become outdated at some point, I'm gonna get a new one.
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Cars and trucks are becoming computers on wheels.
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That means you're gonna have different software.
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Hardware, different utilization patterns, different providers.
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I am currently speaking to you on MacBook Pro, but I have also used, a Lenovo, I've used a Dell, I've used, windows smartphones back in the days.
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I used a Nokia back in the day.
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And if you were to say what is the future of connectivity? It was all of those things and there will be more things to come.
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I think in the same way, there's a really exciting moment where, what's the future of trucks? Our computers on wheels, the rate of adoption of new features is going to be increasing exponentially, even if the hardware is a little more stagnant.
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And along that same lines with electrification, do you see electrification taking hold quickly, or you think there's going to be interim adoptions of different fuel types before we get to a fully electrified fleet? So I don't think every fleet will be fully electrified.
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And the reason I say that is I think every fleet is going to eventually have to be zero emissions.
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There are going to be technologies beyond battery electric systems.
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Some people think it'll be hydrogen, but there's research into other areas, and so at some point I think there will be a distributed amount of solutions, many will be electric.
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I think the bulk of the, space is gonna be electric, I know there's research into other things, whether it's, hydrogen, Google had a project a few years back where they were trying to use seawater.
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I think the future is what we choose to do.
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So if we choose an electrified future, that's great, but my goal isn't electricity must win.
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My goal is zero emissions must win so that we can address the climate crisis.
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And that's also driving several other regulatory drivers.
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So the zero emission side is important from a climate perspective, but it's also from an air quality perspective.
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A lot of the adoption of, for example, natural gas systems initially came about because people were concerned about the PM 2.5,
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so that's particulate matter pollution from diesel vehicles.
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And so they moved.
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Natural gas systems, which have less of those PM 2.5.
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Now you go.
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Cool.
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There's been all this adoption, there's these, natural gas trucks out there.
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At some point people have to acknowledge natural gas was better for air quality if you were judging air quality based on PM 2.5.
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It's still.
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emits methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas.
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So if you are trying to address climate change, natural gas is suddenly not a good solution.
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It was good for can I reduce the asthma rates in my neighborhood? Yes.
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Is it good for, can I address the climate crisis? Not at all.
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A very potent greenhouse gas should not be part of that solution.
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And so I think in the same way that what we knew and thought about natural gas changed over time, I think what we know.
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and what we think we know will change over time as different solutions come into the market.
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And I am not arrogant enough to believe that electricity won't change within my lifetime, but I do believe that a zero emissions future will be the goal.
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Yeah, interesting and what are some things that you're excited about coming soon in the next couple years.
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One of the things is if you look at the way the industry developed historically, California would be the test bed of all these national things, and then as soon as something was successful, it would scale to be a national program.
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We had a gap in that for several years because of both a split congress and then a president who was more interested in trying to get rid of the EPA than to take their learnings and scale it up from California.
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So I think we had a backlog of really good ideas that just, we knew they worked in California and California saw this growing market.
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Our GDP was going up, our emissions were going down, but we weren't seeing those programs transition into a national level and with the IRA.
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A lot of that wishlist.
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I want incentives for commercial trucks that are zero emissions.
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Boom.
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You got it.
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I want incentives for electric school bus.
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Boom.
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You got it.
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I want to see a network of national charging points along our highway quarters.
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Boom, you got it.
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All of these funding areas where there was just a, we need funding to unlock the next step.
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Have all just been.
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and now that the funding isn't the barrier, we're gonna see new challenges of, okay, we need to scale our manufacturing to meet that challenge.
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We need to scale our construction crews who understand how to do these types of projects.
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To meet that challenge, we need to scale our sales processes so that we can sell in 50 states instead of one state.
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And so suddenly, if you remove the big roadblock that was keeping the whole industry back for years, we're gonna see so many exciting developments.
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And I think.
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There's going to be some headlines out there of oh no, this didn't work.
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And it's of course there are going to be hiccups, there are gonna be hurdles, there are going to be things that we never had to solve for before because there wasn't enough development to merit solving that problem.
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If you're only working on 20 projects a year, you don't need to figure out, how do I scale to have a hundred crews working at once and doing oversight of that.
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As soon as you have more projects, you need new processes, and we're gonna see some really exciting growth in pretty much every company.
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I agree.
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I think, there's so much with the IRA that is exciting because a lot of the programs and incentives are also uncapped with a lot of it.
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Yes.
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So a lot of things that will happen, they might sit right now, it has a certain number that is being, allocated for different things, but there's so much more that will be.
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Pumped into the market to really speed things along.
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And it's gonna be a very exciting time for electrification I think the other thing that a lot of people don't think about is like the technical readiness level there's things that are on the bench, there's things that are an early deployment, there's things in pilots, and we're finally getting into the commercial.
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Stage for a lot of these technologies and people have been saying like, oh, that's not gonna happen.
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That's not gonna happen.
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And it's like when I started in the industry, the first time I went to technology assessment work groups and was talking about we're gonna do electric school buses.
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People were telling me it can't be done.
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And I'm like, we're building it.
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And then I would go to technology assessment workshops and I'd, they'd be like, it can't be done.
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And I was like, here's a photo of it.
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I'm riding in it.
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And then we would go to the next technology assessment workshop and we brought the bus with us.
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If you wanna ride it on the lunch break, it's outside And people were still telling us it couldn't be done.
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And it was like it's outside you.
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It's outside.
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You can see it.
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Not only can you see it get in the bus, it will drive you around town.
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Do you want a ride to know that it's real? And people kept having that kind of naysayer of, they can't imagine the possibility until they see it.
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And I think with all of these commercial incentives being unlocked, a lot more people are gonna start to see it in their community.
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It's not just, oh, there's an electric bus that's driving around Reedley, but I don't live in Reedley, so how do I know it's real? You.
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Now it's gonna be, how do we get an electric bus for your kids? How do we make sure that you understand that, oh, this is great.
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It's not noisy, it goes down the street.
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The dogs aren't chasing it cuz they don't hear the engine.
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That's the really exciting inflection point when you start to see how does it reach my community and solve my problem? I know we talked a little bit in our pre-call about, how it might change, relationship dynamics for truckers when having been on a diesel truck and a diesel engine and having all that vibration and noise and that frequency level can impact their hearing over time.
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There's so many health impacts.
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To diesel engines, like one, if you're sitting on something that's vibrating all day, your back is gonna hurt.
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Just you're gonna suddenly have an increase in quality of life, of less pain.
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Hearing loss is something like, we often talk about hearing loss in terms of rock stars being.
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On stages, but diesel engines are really loud.
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And unfortunately, once you lose parts of your hearing, you've lost it.
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And so I think one of those things is you're gonna start to see the experience of workers change when you suddenly have safer workplaces where you're not breathing in pollutants, where you're not damaging your hearing on the daily.
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And that impacts your quality of life.
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But it's not just the driver, it's also one of the biggest sources of pollution for kids is riding in your school bus because the pollution from that diesel engine is coming in through the windows.
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And if you're a small child, your lungs are small.
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It doesn't take much pollution to impact you.
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And so we know there's a body of research on the impacts of childhood asthma on your lifespan, your risk of cardiovascular disease as an adult, your risk of, lung issues.
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All of these, you're gonna start to see health improvements when you have these solutions out in the marketplace.
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But then there's also other things of, we tend not to think about noise pollution, the first electric school bus, one of the things that, this is a little bit of an anecdote that I heard from our advisor who's the fleet director and was driving that first route.
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The second day that the electric school bus was on the road, one of the kids said, Mr.
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Driver, I need you to honk the horn.
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My mom didn't hear the bus yesterday because normally the parents hear the bus coming down the road, all right, I'm gonna go get my kid.
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The kid got to the front door and had to knock on the door because parents couldn't hear the bus.
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Those things do you think of as oh wait, that's a really small thing, but it changes the quality of life.
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If you're working from home and you've got, deliveries coming by and those are in diesel trucks.
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If you've got your trash pickup at four in the morning, and that's a big diesel truck coming in, you got your school bus in the afternoon, a lot of neighborhood.
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are fundamentally transportation routes.
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And if you can cut the noise and pollution in those areas, that's gonna improve everyone's quality of life.
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Not just the drivers, but everybody in the community around where these vehicles are.
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And when you think about goods and people movement, those move in our neighborhoods.
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Like your bus goes on your street, your packages from Amazon are going to arrive on your doorstep.
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Which truck do you want them to arrive in? Just think about, you always, hear, the city sounds and things like that on movies and stuff.
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They always like, you hear the trucks running and honking, and then you think about like highways too.
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You have to put those big, huge barriers.
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To guard against, the sound It's a work site.
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So for example, there's a company in Viatec, I was working with for a bit, and they do an electric power takeoff system that an EPTO that allows you to electrify the work function of a bucket truck.
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So instead of idling your diesel engine to raise, a 25 foot bucket up in the air what if you had a battery doing that, and you go suddenly the person who's up there, cutting trees or working on a utility line can be heard much more easily by the person on the ground.
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That is a safer job site for the person in the bucket.
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That's a safer job site for the person on the ground.
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Those sorts of things.
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Right now that's just for, the work truck function.
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But as you get more of these electric trucks out there, you're gonna see these kinds of scenarios.
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every truck out there has a job and every job is just a little quieter, a little easier, a little more, healthy for you, and that's really good in the long run.
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Yeah, it's really interesting, especially cuz a lot of these solutions, whether they be, electrification of vehicles and transportation or a lot of other solutions, we seem to be hitting a lot of different touchpoints.
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We're not just hitting transportation and cleaning the air, but we're also hitting, being independent from fossil fuels.
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And then we're also hitting, city health and all sorts of other benefits, that's so really good for the economy.
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Like uc.
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Davis did this study a few years back where $1 spent on electricity as a fuel generates about $16 of local economic activity.
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And the reason that happens is when you buy electricity as a fuel.
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You're putting it into your local utility and your local utility is spending money on local suppliers, workers.
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They're shopping locally, and so right now the US is burning hundreds of millions of dollars of fuel a day, and a lot of that is generated overseas.
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And so if you're thinking about what is the green economy look like? The green economy is both good for the companies building these new products, but it's also good for the coffee shop down the street because if your utility lineman is suddenly got more jobs because there's more electricians, there's a higher baseload, all of these things create more economic activity and it's very different than.
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electricity has been in our lives.
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So historically, when you found out of electricity, if it was being generated from coal or natural gas, you wanna use less of it.
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Cuz if you use less, you cut emissions.
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Now we have electricity being generated from both wind, solar, hydro, and.
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That is less than diesel.
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So now if you use more electricity, you're being cleaner.
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So for utilities who for years have been trying to sell, how do you do more with less? This is new load.
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This is an opportunity to expand their infrastructure without having to raise their rates because you get so many new customers and so much new load to carry that you spread it out.
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So if you've got a huge new rate payer base, a lot more energy being used, you can fund some of these grid improvements without in having homeowners having to pay more in the same way they historically did.
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Whereas historically, if I was a homeowner and my utility said, we're gonna do all this new infrastructure, I'm like, so my bill went up.
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Whereas now there's an opportunity for them to do a lot of new activity with all of these new rate payers, these new businesses who are coming on with these commercial plans, and it doesn't have to hit homeowners in the same way.
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And that's a really exciting change that unlocks a lot of possibilities, both on a policy level as well as at a community level that never existed even a decade ago do you think that energy companies are tapping into this, understand that Oh, definitely ability, this is a really exciting moment for them because if you get to have new load for the first time in your career, that's a very different growth profile.
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Then we need to keep cutting energy use.
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That's very exciting.
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For sure.
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And what are your goals for the next six months or so? So I am starting to work on my own project specifically trying to consolidate some of the insights and pain points that I've seen a lot of clean techs companies over my career hit and building tools in that space.
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And so I'll have more details when I'm ready for that.
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But I think it's a really exciting time because the IRA alone is 30 times more spending on Cleantech than existed in all historical programs combined.
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And wow.
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When you think about the amount of scale that 30 x growth means just in public spending, that's not including any investor money.
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Everybody is going to need to scale their processes, and we need to solve that in a way where we don't replicate a bunch of the same mistakes because there are fleets out there who bought electric vehicles from companies that no longer exist because those companies couldn't sustain growth and then imploded on their own weight.
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I think we need to figure out how do we sustainably grow in a way that helps us solve these problems and takes advantage of all of these new tools.
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Yeah, definitely.
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But it's an exciting time for sure.
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Definitely.
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So I love it.
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And, what are you currently learning right now? So much.
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If you are not learning something every day in this industry, you are in the wrong industry because the industry has so many new technologies, new integration points, new financial models the climate side of things, the science is getting better and better.
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So I think one of the things is if you want to be in this industry, you should be a lifelong learner because that is the way you will stay relevant.
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So how can somebody get in touch with you? My website is climatesolution consulting.com.
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I am also easily found on LinkedIn.
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So if you just search LinkedIn for Urvi Nagrani, and if you prefer sort of social media and the occasional tidbits on both industry and politics.
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I am @theurv on Twitter, so T H E U R V.
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Perfect.
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Thank you so much Urvi for coming on to the podcast here.
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It's been really great having you on talking all about EVs and electrification, so thank you so much for coming on the show.
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Definitely.
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It was a lot of fun.
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I hope you have a great day.
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You too.
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And if you enjoy this episode with Urvi Nagrani talking all about the benefits of better infrastructure to prepare for electrification and a zero emission future, but you are still curious about the inflation reduction act that we mentioned during the interview and its impact on climate tech startups, then I invite you to check out this interview.
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With John Gillie and Franz Hochstrasser where we answer your questions on how the IRA is going to impact climate tech startups.
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So don't miss out on this eye-opening episode.
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What does it mean to electrify a fleet? Like how is everything going to be connected to the grid and what are all the logistics that need to be sorted out for fleet electrification to happen? But also let's stop to realize what the ultimate goal is.
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Which is net zero, so maybe it means not even having a fleet at all.
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In this episode, I sit down with Urvi Nagrani, the founder of Climate Solution Consulting, and an EV expert to talk about the future of transportation.
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And some of the benefits to fleet owners converting their fleets to zero emissions from job quality improvements for truckers to the impact on local economies.
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This is a conversation you won't wanna miss.
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So get ready to hear the facts and insights from the front lines of the EV industry.
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Urvi, why don't you go ahead and start off, tell us a little bit about your background.
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So I started in the vehicle electrification space about a decade ago now, initially with a company called Motive Power Systems.
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They're still around.
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And we came in with the idea of we are going to build electric powertrains for medium and heavy duty trucks and buses.
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And the reason that was really important is this was, in the day of Tesla being known for the Roadster.
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This is Pre model three.
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And electrification of vehicles was very limited, even on the light duty side, things like the Leaf, Prius.
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And so we had significantly fewer models, and when it came to medium and heavy duty trucks, nobody was building those as electric systems yet.
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And so coming in, one of the key things that we thought, and our central thesis was that if you've got a delegated assembly model the way that you do for medium and heavy duty trucks, you need to start designing power trains in a way that fits into that.
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So we started by the thesis of we're gonna sell electric power trains into this market.
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And we realized most people don't.
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One, know how to integrate the system, and two, don't want the regulatory liability of working with a regulatory agency and certifying their product.
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So they buy a pre-certified thing from Freightliner or Ford.
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They're not gonna do that paperwork on their own.
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And so if you sell them a system and they have to do regulatory paperwork, it isn't gonna work.
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So we pivoted into selling electric chassis for medium and heavy duty trucks and buses.
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Now those electric chassis got used in a whole variety of applications.
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So we were the first ever company certified to have kids on our electric school buses.
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So other people had made electric buses before, but they were not school buses because there are strict safety standards.
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We also did last mile delivery specialty vehicles.
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So everything from a blood mobile and a trolley all the way to the classic, delivery truck with USPS.
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And so in that time period I got to do a whole bunch of things.
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I did business development, marketing collateral.
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I was doing technology assessment workshops over with the CEC I did our regulatory paperwork and attended all these rule-makings, and so got a crash course in all sorts of different parts of the industry.
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And one of the things is eventually, the industry started changing.
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We had more and more of these products, more and more of these vehicles, and so I decided I wanted to pivot to working on the infrastructure side because if you go to any site today, there is almost certainly enough power for one truck.
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But if you're doing four or five trucks, You got some upgrades to do, and if you're doing 10 trucks, the utility has some upgrades to do.
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And so with vehicle manufacturing over time you start to see a scenario where it gets easier and easier.
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One truck is hard, five trucks is slightly easier cuz you can buy things in bulk.
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10 trucks is easier, but by the time you've gotten to, thousands of trucks, your cost per unit goes down.
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Rah, Rah, go profit.
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Meanwhile on the infrastructure side, every time you do a new construction project, the cost goes up because those things like permitting doesn't scale.
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Utility, interconnections don't scale.
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And in my perspective, once you got to a critical inflection point on, there's so many vehicles that we now get to think about infrastructure, that became the interesting problem for me and.
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When I pivoted infrastructure, I started out as a board advisor with a company called eIQ Mobility.
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And they were eventually acquired by NextEra, but they were working on fleet as a service.
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And so they built a tool that allowed you to compare what are the vehicles out there, what are the sites that are out there, what does their grid power or makeup look like in terms of its renewable standards.
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You're gonna have different emissions if you're charging off of coal versus hydroelectric power.
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All of that consolidated into one tool and it got to work with some really great people.
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It was a lot of fun.
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Next I was at Powerflex for a bit and Powerflex is owned by EDF renewables.
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They're doing some really exciting work on load management, so making sure that you get to use as much power is available within that interconnection.
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and spread it out over your fleet.
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I unfortunately went to Volta at a not great time right before leadership changed.
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So I joined the office of the CEO prior to the CEO leaving, which was a much shorter lived stint than I thought it was gonna be.
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And so this year has been a little more chaotic because in the last year left there and I've gone into consulting.
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So I've been working with a company called Synop, and I'm also working on founding my own project, which is a little bit more under the radar right now, and I can't wait to tell folks about it, but get it a bit more polished first.
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Definitely.
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Make sure it's all ready to go to market exactly.
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I don't wanna pre-launch it when it's not quite ready to be launched.
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I understand that.
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And when you're going through all of this process, you really learned so much about electrification and what's all going on in the industry and with the infrastructure side of things.
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Are you seeing a difference in.
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DC versus AC.
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I've heard that thrown around a bit as well.
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So does that impact the scalability of different installations for different sites? So there's a saying in microgrids that if you've seen one microgrid, you've seen one microgrid.
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And the reason for that is there's a lot of specialized tailoring that happens with any site.
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And so when we think about the future of the grid, I am a little less concerned with the particulars of, what is this power level gonna do to as compared to that? Because that isn't what's guiding decisions when people are choosing AC over DC power.
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It's not because, oh, I want AC power.
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It's not, I want DC power, it's, I want charging that fits within the available power.
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and meets my vehicle's application need and dwell time.
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And so I care a lot more about that because over time you're gonna see a difference in the vehicle types.
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The battery chemistries available, the prevalence or lack of onsite storage, the prevalence or lack of onsite power generation, whether it's through micro generators or solar.
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And the availability of power on the grid.
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And so that's this little dance that's happening on there where you are gonna see some sites where the best solution is gonna be, Hey, the grid's reliable here.
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The power's cheap, the power's renewable.
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This is fine.
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I've got a long dwell time.
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Let's just use what's here.
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You're gonna also see sites where.
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My entire fleet needs to charge in a very short window and needs to charge very quickly, and that I think is gonna be very much fleet dependent, not technology dependent.
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The technology is a tool to solve a problem, so it's much more important to figure out what is the problem you're solving for.
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That was very important.
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What is the question? How do we solve that problem so that we can, find the right solution rather than just saying, oh this should work, and go from there.
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I don't think it's one right solution, and the reason I think it's really important to realize that is.
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Every fleet does things a little different.
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Like a fleet is a purpose-built tool for a business problem.
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So sometimes you might say, for example, like if you were to look at UPS, sometimes the answer is, I want a different truck.
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But in Europe, they're using electric bicycles in some areas.
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And so sometimes the solution isn't even a truck.
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And so if you operate under the assumption that, alright, if I want 10 trucks and I'm gonna have 10 trucks in the future, but they're not gonna have diesel.
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You've already made a bunch of assumptions of, to move X amount of payload efficiently and cleanly.
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I need trucks.
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And I think there's some folks who are thinking about it that way, but I think a lot of the fleets are thinking about what does the future of mobility look like? Whether that is, if you are a urban planner.
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It's not just, all right, I need this many 40 foot buses, and it's always gonna be 40 foot buses.
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You might start going to longer buses.
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You might start integrating with ride sharing platforms for certain areas where route frequency would be harder.
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You might be considering autonomous vehicles, electric bike shares, scooters, and all of those are electric vehicles That can solve your problem of how do I move lots of people with fewer emissions and the.
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On the good side, you might replace multiple vehicles with one large vehicle if they're all doing the same route.
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But you also might distribute it in the other way of maybe the biggest concern isn't the vehicle, maybe the biggest concern is traffic.
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And so in the same way that DoorDash, you've got a lot of delivery folks who are out there on scooters, maybe that's more efficient.
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And I think keeping your eye on that, if a purpose-built fleet is trying to solve a problem, How are they going to solve it based on their purpose? Because the answer's gonna look totally different for a fleet that's, PG E versus UPS versus a taco truck and all of those currently buy some of the same truck types.
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That's super interesting for sure, because it has to be very tailored and you can't just think, oh, one size fits all for across the board.
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So I think, that's really important for people to recognize and realize.
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And you're talking before how now we've hit that size where infrastructure starts to matter because we have a number of adoptions happening with people transitioning to electrification.
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Where do you see, this continuing? Do you see even more fleets and more of this happening? And what rate do you see this happening in the future? So I think we are going to be limited by the utilities.
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Because when you think about a utility scale project for a fleet, let's use the example of a school bus.
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now school bus might have 120 kilowatt hours on it, and you go, okay, that's doable.
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If it's charging at a slow dwell time, it's there for, 10 hours overnight.
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Who cares? But if you start to put a lot of school buses, so maybe you've got a depot and it's got 30 school buses at the same spot.
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you've now put almost a megawatt of charging if you want them all to charge at the same time.
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So you either have to start thinking, okay, how do I manage my charging so that my total power need goes down and the interconnection I need goes down? But you also most likely parked in a parking lot that had no power.
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So you're going from nothing to almost a neighborhood worth of power overnight, and it takes utilities time to bring that service.
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And so you're seeing multiple different companies coming up with sort.
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Power that is a temporary gap filler, like a DC charging in a shipping container where the goal isn't necessarily, that's the end all of charging.
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The goal is how do I charge things here until my utility gets here? And so you're gonna see some of that where the utility is gonna be the long leg of the project and you've just really gotta get started as soon as possible.
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So you might think, I don't need power this year or next year.
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go, okay, if the utility takes three years to design that project and you need it in three years, just because you have not purchased a vehicle and you don't have a plan yet, doesn't mean you shouldn't be getting started.
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That's gonna be a really key part.
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And then the other key thing is gonna be.
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If you are in some areas like warehouse districts where everyone around you has a fleet and everyone around you is gonna need to charge, that entire neighborhood is gonna be constrained.
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It's not just what is coming into your specific site and on your meter, but it's how much power is in that neighborhood.
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And some of that is gonna be offset by, are you using your roof space effectively? Do you have solar there or not? Some of that question is going to be, where's that gonna fit with your other power needs? So it's not that your energy is just for your fleet, it's also, all right, I'm going to put more sustainable lighting.
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I'm gonna put some LEDs in there.
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I am going to have better insulation.
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I need more HVAC because it turns out that summers are getting hotter and if I need cold storage for my foods in this warehouse, I need more HVAC.
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And so suddenly you go, I need to combine all of those.
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into one project because they're all in the same site.
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And one of the things that's really exciting about that is it means that there's spaces for optimizations.
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One of the things that's very scary about that is historically you have a fleet manager who cares a lot about vehicles, and you've got a facility manager who cares about buildings.
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Those two worlds are going to intersect, and they don't always speak the same language, they don't have the same timelines, and they need to learn how to work.
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And that's a hard thing for, it's who can lobby the best, right? Who's gonna, make their argument the best and the fastest so that, they can get their point across.
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And I think that'll be challenging for them.
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It will be challenging.
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And I think one of the bets we're seeing a lot of people in this industry make is there's a whole bunch of businesses.
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Terawatt, Zim Watt EV who all have a somewhat similar model of we're gonna do fleet as a service and electrify a site, and a fleet will come there.
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And for some fleets it might be a better choice not to do construction on a facility that they might be leasing, but instead to lease a new facility when the time comes to get that power.
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There's other facilities that they're going to do that.
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Whether it's their landlords, somebody like Prologis going in on that, or whether it's, I'm such a big client that I own my own real estate portfolio.
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All of these things are happening at the same time.
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It's not one answer that the entire industry is gonna settle on.
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It's what answer is best for you, your fleet, and your site.
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And you could even see for a large company UPS or something like that has multiple different locations all across the country.
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It might be site specific where they have definitely, managers who have to understand, specific things about each place.
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And then they're calling in, consultants to say, okay, this is a good option for this site.
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And then they're calling against somebody else to consider this site.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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And UPS is a great example because they have been a leader in the space, and so almost every EV company that is somewhat mature has sold something to UPS at some point.
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But those pilots aren't on the same site, and so you're not gonna say, all right, this is the site where we're gonna have all of the EVs.
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we're gonna use this site to test Motive.
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We're gonna use this one to text Workhorse.
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We're gonna use this one Exos, literally everybody who's sold a truck is probably gonna sell to them at some point, and they're gonna have a site where it's being tested.
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And then at a portfolio level, they're gonna compare the performance of different types of chargers, different types of trucks, and in the same way that right.
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now their fleet is diverse.
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They own things from a variety of manufacturers.
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That is probably not gonna change.
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I don't think there's gonna be a single source solution anywhere.
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Do you foresee maybe some other companies just observing this and then saying, oh, that one worked the best.
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Let me go use that company? They're definitely going to be folks on different side of the adoption curve.
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So right now we are in a time where if I were a fleet personally, I would want to be buying.
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And the reason I would.
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Is right now we are in the carrot point of carrot and stick, so regulators are going to be coming with a stick and requiring you to do certain things.
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So you can do it by choice right now and get free money to help you make that transition.
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And so your capital costs are gonna be lower.
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There are utility programs on your infrastructure side, and that is a really good time if you're gonna take risks and try new things do it because another fleet might have a great experience and use their fleet in a totally different way than you.
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And so the only way you're gonna know what works best for your fleet is to actually do that.
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And while there's free money, why not take the free money and do it at a cheaper cost and get those learnings before you're fully paying for everything yourself? Are some fleets gonna wait? Yes.
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And they won't have funds to help them, and they're probably gonna be angry when they realize that changing from one technology to another, which most of them have never done.
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For the last several decades, everybody's using the same fuels.
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And so if you've never had to do adoption costs of a new technology, you're gonna be like, ah, sticker shock.
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I think living in Silicon Valley, I am a little more used to the fact that, my laptop will become outdated at some point, I'm gonna get a new one.
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Cars and trucks are becoming computers on wheels.
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That means you're gonna have different software.
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Hardware, different utilization patterns, different providers.
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I am currently speaking to you on MacBook Pro, but I have also used, a Lenovo, I've used a Dell, I've used, windows smartphones back in the days.
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I used a Nokia back in the day.
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And if you were to say what is the future of connectivity? It was all of those things and there will be more things to come.
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I think in the same way, there's a really exciting moment where, what's the future of trucks? Our computers on wheels, the rate of adoption of new features is going to be increasing exponentially, even if the hardware is a little more stagnant.
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And along that same lines with electrification, do you see electrification taking hold quickly, or you think there's going to be interim adoptions of different fuel types before we get to a fully electrified fleet? So I don't think every fleet will be fully electrified.
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And the reason I say that is I think every fleet is going to eventually have to be zero emissions.
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There are going to be technologies beyond battery electric systems.
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Some people think it'll be hydrogen, but there's research into other areas, and so at some point I think there will be a distributed amount of solutions, many will be electric.
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I think the bulk of the, space is gonna be electric, I know there's research into other things, whether it's, hydrogen, Google had a project a few years back where they were trying to use seawater.
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I think the future is what we choose to do.
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So if we choose an electrified future, that's great, but my goal isn't electricity must win.
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My goal is zero emissions must win so that we can address the climate crisis.
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And that's also driving several other regulatory drivers.
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So the zero emission side is important from a climate perspective, but it's also from an air quality perspective.
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A lot of the adoption of, for example, natural gas systems initially came about because people were concerned about the PM 2.5,
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so that's particulate matter pollution from diesel vehicles.
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And so they moved.
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Natural gas systems, which have less of those PM 2.5.
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Now you go.
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Cool.
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There's been all this adoption, there's these, natural gas trucks out there.
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At some point people have to acknowledge natural gas was better for air quality if you were judging air quality based on PM 2.5.
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It's still.
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emits methane, which is a very potent greenhouse gas.
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So if you are trying to address climate change, natural gas is suddenly not a good solution.
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It was good for can I reduce the asthma rates in my neighborhood? Yes.
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Is it good for, can I address the climate crisis? Not at all.
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A very potent greenhouse gas should not be part of that solution.
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And so I think in the same way that what we knew and thought about natural gas changed over time, I think what we know.
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and what we think we know will change over time as different solutions come into the market.
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And I am not arrogant enough to believe that electricity won't change within my lifetime, but I do believe that a zero emissions future will be the goal.
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Yeah, interesting and what are some things that you're excited about coming soon in the next couple years.
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One of the things is if you look at the way the industry developed historically, California would be the test bed of all these national things, and then as soon as something was successful, it would scale to be a national program.
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We had a gap in that for several years because of both a split congress and then a president who was more interested in trying to get rid of the EPA than to take their learnings and scale it up from California.
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So I think we had a backlog of really good ideas that just, we knew they worked in California and California saw this growing market.
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Our GDP was going up, our emissions were going down, but we weren't seeing those programs transition into a national level and with the IRA.
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A lot of that wishlist.
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I want incentives for commercial trucks that are zero emissions.
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Boom.
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You got it.
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I want incentives for electric school bus.
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Boom.
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You got it.
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I want to see a network of national charging points along our highway quarters.
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Boom, you got it.
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All of these funding areas where there was just a, we need funding to unlock the next step.
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Have all just been.
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and now that the funding isn't the barrier, we're gonna see new challenges of, okay, we need to scale our manufacturing to meet that challenge.
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We need to scale our construction crews who understand how to do these types of projects.
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To meet that challenge, we need to scale our sales processes so that we can sell in 50 states instead of one state.
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And so suddenly, if you remove the big roadblock that was keeping the whole industry back for years, we're gonna see so many exciting developments.
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And I think.
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There's going to be some headlines out there of oh no, this didn't work.
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And it's of course there are going to be hiccups, there are gonna be hurdles, there are going to be things that we never had to solve for before because there wasn't enough development to merit solving that problem.
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If you're only working on 20 projects a year, you don't need to figure out, how do I scale to have a hundred crews working at once and doing oversight of that.
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As soon as you have more projects, you need new processes, and we're gonna see some really exciting growth in pretty much every company.
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I agree.
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I think, there's so much with the IRA that is exciting because a lot of the programs and incentives are also uncapped with a lot of it.
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Yes.
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So a lot of things that will happen, they might sit right now, it has a certain number that is being, allocated for different things, but there's so much more that will be.
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Pumped into the market to really speed things along.
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And it's gonna be a very exciting time for electrification I think the other thing that a lot of people don't think about is like the technical readiness level there's things that are on the bench, there's things that are an early deployment, there's things in pilots, and we're finally getting into the commercial.
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Stage for a lot of these technologies and people have been saying like, oh, that's not gonna happen.
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That's not gonna happen.
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And it's like when I started in the industry, the first time I went to technology assessment work groups and was talking about we're gonna do electric school buses.
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People were telling me it can't be done.
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And I'm like, we're building it.
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And then I would go to technology assessment workshops and I'd, they'd be like, it can't be done.
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And I was like, here's a photo of it.
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I'm riding in it.
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And then we would go to the next technology assessment workshop and we brought the bus with us.
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If you wanna ride it on the lunch break, it's outside And people were still telling us it couldn't be done.
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And it was like it's outside you.
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It's outside.
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You can see it.
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Not only can you see it get in the bus, it will drive you around town.
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Do you want a ride to know that it's real? And people kept having that kind of naysayer of, they can't imagine the possibility until they see it.
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And I think with all of these commercial incentives being unlocked, a lot more people are gonna start to see it in their community.
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It's not just, oh, there's an electric bus that's driving around Reedley, but I don't live in Reedley, so how do I know it's real? You.
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Now it's gonna be, how do we get an electric bus for your kids? How do we make sure that you understand that, oh, this is great.
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It's not noisy, it goes down the street.
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The dogs aren't chasing it cuz they don't hear the engine.
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That's the really exciting inflection point when you start to see how does it reach my community and solve my problem? I know we talked a little bit in our pre-call about, how it might change, relationship dynamics for truckers when having been on a diesel truck and a diesel engine and having all that vibration and noise and that frequency level can impact their hearing over time.
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There's so many health impacts.
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To diesel engines, like one, if you're sitting on something that's vibrating all day, your back is gonna hurt.
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Just you're gonna suddenly have an increase in quality of life, of less pain.
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Hearing loss is something like, we often talk about hearing loss in terms of rock stars being.
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On stages, but diesel engines are really loud.
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And unfortunately, once you lose parts of your hearing, you've lost it.
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And so I think one of those things is you're gonna start to see the experience of workers change when you suddenly have safer workplaces where you're not breathing in pollutants, where you're not damaging your hearing on the daily.
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And that impacts your quality of life.
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But it's not just the driver, it's also one of the biggest sources of pollution for kids is riding in your school bus because the pollution from that diesel engine is coming in through the windows.
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And if you're a small child, your lungs are small.
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It doesn't take much pollution to impact you.
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And so we know there's a body of research on the impacts of childhood asthma on your lifespan, your risk of cardiovascular disease as an adult, your risk of, lung issues.
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All of these, you're gonna start to see health improvements when you have these solutions out in the marketplace.
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But then there's also other things of, we tend not to think about noise pollution, the first electric school bus, one of the things that, this is a little bit of an anecdote that I heard from our advisor who's the fleet director and was driving that first route.
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The second day that the electric school bus was on the road, one of the kids said, Mr.
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Driver, I need you to honk the horn.
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My mom didn't hear the bus yesterday because normally the parents hear the bus coming down the road, all right, I'm gonna go get my kid.
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The kid got to the front door and had to knock on the door because parents couldn't hear the bus.
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Those things do you think of as oh wait, that's a really small thing, but it changes the quality of life.
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If you're working from home and you've got, deliveries coming by and those are in diesel trucks.
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If you've got your trash pickup at four in the morning, and that's a big diesel truck coming in, you got your school bus in the afternoon, a lot of neighborhood.
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are fundamentally transportation routes.
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And if you can cut the noise and pollution in those areas, that's gonna improve everyone's quality of life.
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Not just the drivers, but everybody in the community around where these vehicles are.
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And when you think about goods and people movement, those move in our neighborhoods.
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Like your bus goes on your street, your packages from Amazon are going to arrive on your doorstep.
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Which truck do you want them to arrive in? Just think about, you always, hear, the city sounds and things like that on movies and stuff.
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They always like, you hear the trucks running and honking, and then you think about like highways too.
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You have to put those big, huge barriers.
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To guard against, the sound It's a work site.
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So for example, there's a company in Viatec, I was working with for a bit, and they do an electric power takeoff system that an EPTO that allows you to electrify the work function of a bucket truck.
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So instead of idling your diesel engine to raise, a 25 foot bucket up in the air what if you had a battery doing that, and you go suddenly the person who's up there, cutting trees or working on a utility line can be heard much more easily by the person on the ground.
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That is a safer job site for the person in the bucket.
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That's a safer job site for the person on the ground.
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Those sorts of things.
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Right now that's just for, the work truck function.
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But as you get more of these electric trucks out there, you're gonna see these kinds of scenarios.
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every truck out there has a job and every job is just a little quieter, a little easier, a little more, healthy for you, and that's really good in the long run.
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Yeah, it's really interesting, especially cuz a lot of these solutions, whether they be, electrification of vehicles and transportation or a lot of other solutions, we seem to be hitting a lot of different touchpoints.
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We're not just hitting transportation and cleaning the air, but we're also hitting, being independent from fossil fuels.
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And then we're also hitting, city health and all sorts of other benefits, that's so really good for the economy.
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Like uc.
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Davis did this study a few years back where $1 spent on electricity as a fuel generates about $16 of local economic activity.
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And the reason that happens is when you buy electricity as a fuel.
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You're putting it into your local utility and your local utility is spending money on local suppliers, workers.
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They're shopping locally, and so right now the US is burning hundreds of millions of dollars of fuel a day, and a lot of that is generated overseas.
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And so if you're thinking about what is the green economy look like? The green economy is both good for the companies building these new products, but it's also good for the coffee shop down the street because if your utility lineman is suddenly got more jobs because there's more electricians, there's a higher baseload, all of these things create more economic activity and it's very different than.
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electricity has been in our lives.
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So historically, when you found out of electricity, if it was being generated from coal or natural gas, you wanna use less of it.
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Cuz if you use less, you cut emissions.
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Now we have electricity being generated from both wind, solar, hydro, and.
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That is less than diesel.
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So now if you use more electricity, you're being cleaner.
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So for utilities who for years have been trying to sell, how do you do more with less? This is new load.
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This is an opportunity to expand their infrastructure without having to raise their rates because you get so many new customers and so much new load to carry that you spread it out.
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So if you've got a huge new rate payer base, a lot more energy being used, you can fund some of these grid improvements without in having homeowners having to pay more in the same way they historically did.
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Whereas historically, if I was a homeowner and my utility said, we're gonna do all this new infrastructure, I'm like, so my bill went up.
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Whereas now there's an opportunity for them to do a lot of new activity with all of these new rate payers, these new businesses who are coming on with these commercial plans, and it doesn't have to hit homeowners in the same way.
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And that's a really exciting change that unlocks a lot of possibilities, both on a policy level as well as at a community level that never existed even a decade ago do you think that energy companies are tapping into this, understand that Oh, definitely ability, this is a really exciting moment for them because if you get to have new load for the first time in your career, that's a very different growth profile.
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Then we need to keep cutting energy use.
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That's very exciting.
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For sure.
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And what are your goals for the next six months or so? So I am starting to work on my own project specifically trying to consolidate some of the insights and pain points that I've seen a lot of clean techs companies over my career hit and building tools in that space.
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And so I'll have more details when I'm ready for that.
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But I think it's a really exciting time because the IRA alone is 30 times more spending on Cleantech than existed in all historical programs combined.
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And wow.
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When you think about the amount of scale that 30 x growth means just in public spending, that's not including any investor money.
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Everybody is going to need to scale their processes, and we need to solve that in a way where we don't replicate a bunch of the same mistakes because there are fleets out there who bought electric vehicles from companies that no longer exist because those companies couldn't sustain growth and then imploded on their own weight.
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I think we need to figure out how do we sustainably grow in a way that helps us solve these problems and takes advantage of all of these new tools.
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Yeah, definitely.
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But it's an exciting time for sure.
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Definitely.
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So I love it.
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And, what are you currently learning right now? So much.
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If you are not learning something every day in this industry, you are in the wrong industry because the industry has so many new technologies, new integration points, new financial models the climate side of things, the science is getting better and better.
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So I think one of the things is if you want to be in this industry, you should be a lifelong learner because that is the way you will stay relevant.
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So how can somebody get in touch with you? My website is climatesolution consulting.com.
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I am also easily found on LinkedIn.
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So if you just search LinkedIn for Urvi Nagrani, and if you prefer sort of social media and the occasional tidbits on both industry and politics.
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I am @theurv on Twitter, so T H E U R V.
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Perfect.
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Thank you so much Urvi for coming on to the podcast here.
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It's been really great having you on talking all about EVs and electrification, so thank you so much for coming on the show.
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Definitely.
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It was a lot of fun.
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I hope you have a great day.
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You too.
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And if you enjoy this episode with Urvi Nagrani talking all about the benefits of better infrastructure to prepare for electrification and a zero emission future, but you are still curious about the inflation reduction act that we mentioned during the interview and its impact on climate tech startups, then I invite you to check out this interview.
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With John Gillie and Franz Hochstrasser where we answer your questions on how the IRA is going to impact climate tech startups.
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So don't miss out on this eye-opening episode.
