Day 2 Green Tech 2021 - May 6, 2021

Tiffany Wise-West / City of Santa Cruz

Amanda: Jump on in. Yes, I'm really excited about our first presenter, my colleague Tiffany Wise West. Welcome aboard. We're very excited to hear what you're up to.

Tiffany: Thanks so much. It's really great to be here. Hello, everyone. I'm the sustainability and climate action manager at the city of Santa Cruz. I lead our city strategy on emissions reduction and climate adaptation, most recently our Resilient Coast initiative, looking at sea level rise. And I'm also our staff lead on our Health in All Policies initiative, which prioritizes equity, public health and sustainability in decision making.

This topic is important to me because I'm working with the community to develop equitable pathways for the city to become carbon neutral. And the green economy and green jobs is a big part of this, in addition to it being part of the city's recovery plan. Next slide, please.

So together, we're really thinking about green jobs.The green economy, again, as this is an equitable pathway to carbon neutrality and part of our workforce development initiative that is coming out of our interim recovery plan. You can see here our health in all policies in Santa Cruz County, our core community well-being metrics. Of course, what we're driving towards, is that these green jobs can lead to better outcomes in terms of all of these core conditions. Next slide, please. So we're really thinking about this climate action planning process that is occurring over this next year where we're working towards a 20, 30 time horizon.

We're thinking about using less climate jargon, and there's opportunities for those that want to geek out on that technical stuff more so really trying to connect to an appeal to what people care about resilience, safe, healthy and sustainable Santa that prioritizes voices that maybe haven't been heard in the past. And many things we've heard about yesterday and you'll be hearing about tonight will be evaluated in that process this summer. We will have a special component where we will be doing a green economy and jobs analysis.

Next slide, please, which again will feed into our interim recovery plans, workforce development initiative, building on our economic development department. Amanda Rotella in many of her colleagues, their great work already. This is really exciting. We're mapping our ecosystem of partners, so to speak, in this whole initiative. We've already begun our Meir's Green Economy and Jobs Roundtable series with a study session on April 20th on natural environment related jobs. The next one will be in August.

So in addition to what the green jobs and analysis tells us in terms of where the jobs are and how to make make them make sure that folks are trained up for those jobs and that we have good matching, we are thinking about some other areas as well. We've our early analysis tells us we have somewhere between twenty five hundred and thirty five hundred green jobs in the city already, largely due to construction related environmental services and some health care. But we're thinking about how can we design, promote and fund our coastal resiliency projects, our transportation, water, parks, infrastructure and so on, to stimulate local design and construction jobs and in turn benefit businesses that they frequent and so forth.

We're also looking at work, municipal workforce development in skilled positions like water meter readers, water treatment plant operators. How can we turn young adults on to these good jobs and train them? Our mayors also really thinking about these blue collar to green collar notion about how to keep local talent trained in hospitality, tourism and service workers that might also have some education or interest in things like coastal interpretation, rangers, urban forestry and climate monitoring, coastal and forest monitoring, other jobs that draw on these skills and interests that showcase the places they love and why they live here.

And then lastly, of course, building electrification, transportation, electrification is something that we are also exploring as part of our planning process. We have adopted a natural gas prohibition and new construction and we're looking at existing buildings. Lastly, we're also interested in business resiliency, climate incubators. And just to end here, my last slide, please. We're also actively evaluating federal and state funding and resources, as Congressman Panetta talked about yesterday, to secure and implement these plans.

And if you're interested in this work, please get in touch with me. You can sign up for our email list at Santacruz Dotcom for Climate Action Plan. And we have many diverse opportunities for engagement. And we're really, again, trying to build our ecosystem and our relationships with workforce development partners. So please contact me if that's something of interest to you and I'll stop there. Thank you. Yay, thank you so much, Tiffany, it always blows my mind all the things you're working on right now.

Robert Singleton / Bird Scooters

Yeah, happy to be here and be talking about bird next slide. So today I'm going to be talking about the state of micro mobility. And so micro mobility for those of you who are unfamiliar is the way we get around using smaller vehicles.

They tend to be bikes or scooters. They tend to be used for shorter transit trips. They are mostly electric, but don't always have to be. And they're primarily meant for urban transit. So the next slide, so a little bit about myself. So my name is Robert Singleton. I am the government partnerships manager for Bird Rides covering the Pacific Northwest Rockies and Central Coast to California regions. I'm also just a local government nerd. I've been a planning commissioner in the past.

I love talking about development and transit. And I'm currently in a master's program focused on city and county management. So again, local government nerd. Next slide, please. So I want to talk to you a little bit about Bird who we are. So we are fundamentally a micro mobility company. So we were founded in twenty seventeen in Santa Monica. And our mission is to make cities more livable by reducing car usage, traffic and carbon emissions. And the way we do this is providing an On-Demand fleet of vehicles, mostly scooters.

But we do also have bikes and other adaptable vehicles for folks experiencing disabilities. But we are very young. As I said, we're about three years old, but we are now in one hundred and sixty cities across North America, Europe and Asia, including San Francisco, Paris, Denver, Los Angeles and Amsterdam. Next slide. So the thing I would love to talk with you guys about today is transportation equity, transportation equity is all about ensuring that everyone, regardless of socioeconomic status, race or gender or age or ability, has access to transportation to fulfill their individual needs.

So we want to talk about how we can use innovation, innovative technology, increased access and cooperation or collaboration with our public transit partners, and then how we can talk about deployment, being able to reach more folks across the urban landscape. So next slide. So if we look at about a 10 year horizon of the micro mobility, we can see that it's grown pretty close to exponentially. And in particular, the last three years, the lion's share of the growth has been in those vehicles and in particular, Dakhla Scooters. The doctor's bike share programs do make up a big part of it, as well as traditional bike share programs. Next slide.

So who's actually riding these vehicles? So it turns out it's not just tech pros riding around San Francisco scooters, but actually the largest income group that rides these vehicles is making between twenty five and fifty thousand dollars a year, whereas the lowest ridership rate are the folks making over two hundred thousand dollars a year. Next slide.

And we've seen this play out in a number of markets. Here is a look at Portland. So you can actually see the breakdown based upon income earned and you can see the ridership for scooters is more diverse than the actual income distribution of Portland, which means that we're having more lower income riders on these metro mobility vehicles pretty much never before. And they're the ones who ride these vehicles the most next slide. And we also have a lot of academic research to back this up.

Essentially, we found that scooters are a lot more approachable than, say, bikes, but perhaps there's a cultural stigma around bikes in urban areas. But scooters are a little bit more approachable. They're primarily used for commuting over active recreation. And we have data that says roughly thirty five percent of all scooter trips directly replace a car trip.

And also nonwhite folks are significantly more likely to try to ride scooters than a bike than electrified. Next slide. So we want to talk about transportation access and how we can take these new micro mobility strategies and pair them with existing mass transit. So next slide. So in working with partnerships with with agencies like the San Francisco Metro or Metropolitan Transportation Agency, we did a number of surveys about scooters and how they connect with transportation options currently. So we found that roughly thirty four percent of those of those surveyed who came to transportation stop using a scooter, were using it to get primarily are we're going to use transportation.

So and basically what we've seen is that while there may be worries about mobility options, replacing mass transit, we've actually found the opposite, that micro mobility options and increased access to these vehicles induce transit trips at a rate of roughly four times than what the replacement side. A great example of this is we've been able to work with a lot of other cities. This is also from Portland and which we create dynamic pricing. So we actually work with them to create a transportation wallet which allows lower income residents to be able to get direct public subsidies for all the different types of transit around Portland.

So this means bus, streetcar, bike or scooter or other adaptive vehicle. Next slide. Next, we want to talk about just why deployment is so important and why the Dallas model, as well as paired with traditional bike share models, is more important, is going next slide. So why is it that scooters are being able to reach such reach, such unique market niche? Well, they utilize existing infrastructure, so you don't have to make any kind of major public investments.

And by not having not requiring corrals, you're able to best to manage a dynamic like a dynamic model. So we actually have folks who are on the ground in every city that we're operating in, being able to look at real time data dashboards and be able to optimize the fleet availability based upon where people are actually going and work. Car trips are actually taking place. Scooters also tend to be lighter, they're cheaper, they're foldable, they're easier to store, they're easier to deploy, and therefore it's easier to get them to areas that are traditionally underserved.

And because of the dynamic cost model, we can actually subsidize lower income folks to be able to use these scooters while also charging a premium to other writers, which can help fund things like infrastructure or other public programs. So we work directly with our government partners to transition and create revenue for the kinds of qualities and things that they are looking for. Last slide.

So scooters, we're the future of mobility. We're coming to a city near you.

We want to help. We want to help bolster your existing transportation options and help you solve that last mile problem. So with that, I'll leave it and take any questions. Well, we'll save the questions to the very end, Robert, but but please, everyone, if you want to ask Robert something directly, put it in Q&A and he will respond in writing and now going to.

JoeBen Bevirt / Joby Aviation

Doug: Go ahead. I just want to everybody knows JoeBen, but what you don't know is that I, I just by chance, caught him on the beach up at Scott's Creek kitesurfing and asked him to to present to us. So very, very stoked to have you. And thank you again.

JoeBen: Thank you, Doug. I am thrilled to be here. I am. I think I've I've been coming to talk to the the Santa Cruz Works crowd for over a decade now. This this company has been a dream of mine since I was a little boy in Santa Cruz riding the bus home from school. And, I started this company, here in Santa Cruz 13 years ago.

And it's just really wonderful to have the opportunity to speak with you guys. We are in the process of of becoming a public company, and so I have to add a bit of a legal disclaimer here. So this is a video of our aircraft flying.

Our Aircraft, it's an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. It's got to be like helicopter, but then it's like an airplane with a significantly reduced environmental footprint. It also means that it's incredibly quiet. We've been working on this on this plane for years to solve a really critical need.

And as a larger and larger percentage of the world's population moves to cities, congestion becomes exponentially worse. And it's more important than ever that we really focus on sustainability, as Stephanie was speaking about. And this this aircraft really fixes a number of a really critical and fundamental issues that we have as a global civilization. We've designed it as an air taxi or a aerial ride sharing service. So it has a pilot and four passengers.

Again, it can take off and land vertically, which is really crucial to being able to get passengers from where they are, to where they want to go. And because it's electric, as I mentioned, it is zero emissions when running off of a clean, clean electricity grid. It has range for a wide variety of missions, whether that's across town or to a nearby city. It's fast. And as I mentioned, we've been working on it here in Santa Cruz for many years now.

We see this as an incredible opportunity to deliver people's time savings, to get them to their destinations as much as five times faster, and we believe that this is a solution that really scales globally. So as we think about, you know, how how we're bringing this this service to two customers, it's it's really as a vertically integrated mode of transportation. We're not just designing the aircraft and manufacturing the aircraft, but we're operating the aircraft and providing a mobility service to our customers.

So it's it's an app based interface where you can pull out your phone and book a seat, and this is being developed by a team of more than 700 incredible employees. Again, we were founded here in Santa Cruz. We are setting up our production facility in Marina, California, near Monterey. We have a team of incredible power train engineers in San Carlos and with additional teams in Washington, D.C. and in Munich, Germany. Again, as I spoke about, this is a a service that's seamlessly integrates the multimodal journeys, so it allows us to book a bird scooter or an Uber to get to your work and then seamlessly have a ride waiting for you to pick you up from a skateboard on the other end.

So this is an example of a trip from the marina in San Francisco to for example, your home in San Jose. So this is really a transformational capability to offer this seamless multimodal experience. And we are incredibly fortunate to have Toyota, who led our series C financing in early in 2020 with more than a 400 million dollar investment, but more importantly, Toyota has also partnered with us on manufacturing.

And so they have more than 50 engineers who are working shoulder to shoulder with us, designing our our production facility and helping us to scale up our production line. And the the there's no company in the world that is better at making incredibly large, complex systems with incredible quality and incredible reliability. And we're just so, so fortunate and grateful to the partnership of Toyota and every member of the Toyota team that's working with us. And with that, I'd love to answer any questions that people have.

And again, I'm so grateful to you for the opportunity to come in and speak to this to the community here again. And I'd also like to express my incredible gratitude for this community for being so nurturing and so supportive of jobs as we've grown and everyone in Santa Cruz and and locally here in Bonny Doon. We're so thankful for the support over over the years, so thanks again.

Doug: Well, thank you. And I'm hoping that the background that you have there of the trees or one of the ones that was spared in the fires last year, that was pretty scary, wasn't it?

JoeBen: Yeah. So the trees behind me actually got singed in the in the fire in 2008. And so we we were we worked incredible teamwork among the community here to try to save as much of the forest and as many of the homes as we could here in Bonny Doon.

Doug: Yeah, I mean, we saw a huge effort from Reyna and her and that group up in Bonnie Doon, where they just band of brothers and sisters that got together and said not we're not going to let this happen to our slice of paradise there. So that was that was an incredible effort there.

JoeBen: And that it was one of the proudest, proudest moments of of, you know, everybody who was up here. It was one of the proudest moments of our lives. They've been fighting for us and saving the homes. OK, so, Matthew, are there some questions that you want to send to ask Joby and remember, you know, we have to be guarded here in terms of what we ask. Oh, we got some big questions here. No, we'll get you off the hook here.

Matthew: But we do actually have quite a few questions. And the first question is the question that honestly I've thought about, and I hear people ask it all the time, how do you become a job pilot? Is there a certain like other kind of pilot license you need to have or how can you actually become a pilot?

JoeBen: Yeah, so one of the really amazing things is that we this is this aircraft is incredibly easy to fly. It's very similar to flying a traditional airplane, even though you have six motors. All you have from a pilot interface standpoint is a stick and an acceleration lever. And the stick you use just like with an airplane, when you pull back, the airplane goes up and you push forward and it goes down, left for left, right for right.

And then the acceleration lever is just the farther you move it forward, the the more you you accelerate. So it's very, very intuitive to fly and it's very similar to flying an airplane. And so as a result, if you have a a pilot's license, you can we can very safely train you to become a Jobi pilot. And we are setting up a pilot training academy in in Marena. And Bonnie Seemy, who joined us from JetBlue and she built was part of the team that that built the pilot training academy for JetBlue.

And it's absolutely incredible to have her as well as a whole team of certified flight instructors. And we're in the process of building out our our pilot training academy.

Doug: And so that's we also get to hear from the CEO of Concentric, Amy, here, who was a fighter pilot. So we're going to ask Amy if she's ready to go through pilot school again and learn how to fly a job vehicle. That's fantastic.

JoeBen: I would love love to have you come. Come fly the simulator. It's really fun. Stimulated cool any other. Yeah, here's one other question, it's from Matthew who who actually spoke yesterday at our event. Where and when can we expect the first Bay Area port? So we are actively engaged with local local property owners and with local municipalities looking at where our first sky ports will be sited, and there's an incredible amount of excitement and interest in the the economic vitality that these new sky ports will will bring.

Bates Marshall / Ambient Photonics

That's right. Thanks, Doug. Now we get to learn what an ambient cell is all. I am Bates Marshall and I'm the co-founder and CEO of Ambient Photonics. I'm also a local Santa Cruz guy. I grew up in the local community, went to Santa Cruz. I have four kids in the local school.

So deep, deep connections to Santa Cruz and love my hometown. I have spent the last twenty six years or so working in semiconductor and electronics and solar manufacturing and technology, and I'm really pleased to introduce the company to you guys today. Ambient photonics is commercializing a new form of solar cell. So, Doug, it is a it is a solar cell, after all, but it's a novel form. So this is a non non silicon solar cell.

And we aim to provide the cell to connected device and electronics manufacturers as a primary source of power, thereby avoiding battery waste and the hassle, expense and environmental problems associated with that. So I'm happy to tell you about the company today. So we started a couple of years ago and we have been quietly, stealthily partnering with some very large, smart home and Iot device companies. And we're all about reimagining connected devices with endless power sort of from thin air.

So these are these are solar cells or PV cells, as we call them, which don't need any kind of access to the sun. They don't need solar energy at all. In fact, they just need light. They need the NBN energy. So we have world record, indoor energy harvesting solar cells. We've developed a model to apply these cells. So that means we have the know how and we have the people, we have the the capabilities and expertize to help our customers to adopt them.

And then finally, all this stuff is enabled through a very low cost, printable manufacturing process, which enables us to deploy our first pilot scale manufacturing line actually in the Santa Cruz area. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in the back end. So what it is we've done, we've created the world's most powerful, low light energy harvesting photovoltaic cells or solar solar PV cells. And these these products, unlike some very high power density products which came to market in recent years, are actually cost compatible with the tough price points required for consumer electronics and Iot devices generally.

So why are we doing this and what's what's really the issue? So our observation is that batteries are the problem, batteries are the barrier and they are limiting Iot scaling. So whether we think about the inconvenience, the kind of range anxiety or battery anxiety that we all feel in our and our personal life, when your devices are draining every day sustainability, of course, battery disposal is a massive challenge and the environmental considerations around a mass battery disposal are really formidable.

Cost is a really big deal for some of these applications, not necessarily for the the cost of the batteries themselves, but we think about a lot of commercial and industrial applications where the operating expense of the labor associated with replacing large Iot nodes and Iot networks is really formidable. And finally, reliability. If your devices powered by a battery in the battery runs out, your device is no longer functioning. So we think batteries are really holding back the growth of Iot generally.

So around the home and this is a market that's just exploded, especially in the last couple of years with people staying at home because of the pandemic, people outfitting their home with all kinds of gadgets. And of course, all of the super major tech companies are really interested to spread these devices all over the home. And if you like me and have started to deploy these things, run your own home, then your phone is blowing up every couple of days or every couple of weeks telling you to go recharge this or that or go to batteries on something.

It's becoming a significant source of frustration. We also see tons of applications around commercial or industrial Iot. And actually we find that a lot of these applications are our growth constrained because of this operating expense issue around battery replacement. And then lately we've been seeing quite a shift, actually. Maybe some of this is due to the change in the climate in Washington, so to speak. The sustainability issues really coming to the foreground at CES this year. Just this past January, Samsung announced that their new TV remote controls are going to be powered by a solar PV cell.

And just with that one action, Samsung says they're going to avoid the disposal of ninety nine million triple-A batteries from landfills. So this has begun become kind of a tipping point. You're going to see lots and lots of other TV remote controls also powered by a solar PV cell. And this is just, say, the tip of the spear here in penetration of solar cells as a primary source of power for. Who were devices? So why is our cell different than than those cells, those cells that that I showed you on the Samsung remote?

Those are a type of cell which have been widely deployed, let's say, since the 1970s. Those are amorphous silicon cells. They're quite low power density. And they actually have a quite a high carbon footprint, especially in this application where they're not really generating a lot of power. So they're nowhere close to their energy payback in this type of application, in contrast to solar panels that you might put on your roof or in a utility scale power plant.

So these old school conventional solar cells just won't do for connected device applications that we're talking about today. So what have we done? Well, we've invented this novel, low light solar PV cell. It's the only solar energy technology that works across the light spectrum. So what this means is we don't rely on solar light. We can use artificial light, we can use LSD, we can use fluorescent light. We've been tuning our device to work across the the visible light spectrum and we harvest light from all of these different light sources.

So what does it mean for our customers and for device manufacturers? We have roughly three times the power in average indoor light. So a kind of light you might find in your living room in the in the afternoon or the evening, in lower light, let's say at dawn or late in the evening when there's just a couple of lights on in the house, we make up to eight times the power of conventional, amorphous silicon cell. So that means that over a twenty four hour cycle, we're making considerably more power than conventional connected embedded PV cells.

We also have a technology for low light outdoor applications. And these are you can think of these as sort of outdoor applications in which you don't have a direct view of the southern sky. So applications around entry doors, video doorbell's entry door locks and the like where you might want to power that device. You might get a little bit more light than you have outside, but you're not getting a direct view of the sky. We've got about a three times advantage in that application compared to crystalline silicon solar cells.

So all of this stuff is is this sort of academic if we can't bring it to bring it to reality in high volume. And that's what we're in the process of doing right now. So we have been working with partners for the last couple of years. And I'm really pleased to say we're just about to break ground on our first pilot scale manufacturing facility. That pilot facility is going to be located co-located with our HQ, which is going to be in the Santa Cruz area.

So really excited to be bringing this this technology to the to the local market, bringing lots of of local clean tech jobs. This production system, by the way, I mentioned pilot scale. It is capable of between 30 million and 60 million cells per year, depending on the cell size. We have a digitally defined printable manufacturing process so we can make arbitrary shapes of cells and sizes depending on the customer requirements. So 30 to 60 million cells is sounds like a big number because anything in the in the millions is a pretty big number.

But the types of customers that we're addressing consume tens of millions of devices every year. So we're going to burn through that capacity pretty quickly and start working on the next plant. So, Doug, you asked us for our call to action. I have one we are looking for talented people. Our production line doesn't go online until the middle of next year, but we break ground in a couple of months and we're going to start scaling up our operations.

Really critical hires for us are listed on this slide, especially applications engineering. So talented guys who have the ability to to work with our customers, to apply our technology and then process engineers, people that know something about screen printing, laser processing, anything to do with process engineering, a glass based processing at scale. Anyway, we've got a little bit of a website up now where we're slowly emerging from stealth and you can go to the website and sign up and contact us to learn more about products or about how you might find a job with us.

So thanks so much, Doug, and thanks for giving us the chance to talk today.

Amy Tomlinson / Concentric Power

Thanks so much. Take a look at the Q&A. I think there might be some questions in there for you. And we're going to jump right on to Concentric Power with Amy. Welcome. Hi. Thank you so much, Amanda and Doug, I am Amy Thomlinson, and I'm very happy to be here with you all this evening. Thanks for having me. And I'll just jump right in to tell you a little bit about your power tonight. So consider power.

We are in the business of making intelligent micro grids of infrastructure, and we are helping customers realize how to get to this zero carbon power procurement by way of adding a micro credit to their facility or their community or wherever it is that they're trying to get this zero carbon power. We are vertically integrated. So to say that we design the system, we will help finance it. We build it, we own it. We stick by as an energy partner with the customer and then operate and maintain it for 20 or 30 years for the life of the project.

And all the while, as these microgrid are developed, they will together build what we hope to be the largest network of intelligent micro grids in California. We were founded in 2010 and so we're on our 11th year and I am the developer. I think earlier Doug said I was the CEO. I am not. Brian Curtis is our CEO and founder of the company. I'm the project development director.

I build and develop the projects and we are working a lot focused on the agriculture industry here locally in the Salinas Valley as well as down in the Central Valley and Bakersfield area, and have found quite a need in the ag industry. So if you go to the next slide, Amanda, I'll tell kind of the story of where we felt like the problem was, while everybody needs power and reliable power, the ag industry in California is very critical for all of us.

In California, we are the number one food processing plant in the country, double the size of number two, which is in New York, where all of our food comes from. One third of our vegetables come from right here in California. And two thirds of all the fruits and nuts that our nation consumes comes right here from California. So we need to have reliable power for the ag industry next time. And as most of you probably know, because it's happened to our individual households as well as to industry, that the events or public safety power shut off events have started in twenty, eighteen, nineteen.

A lot of it was due to the fires that put PG&E into bankruptcy and those blackouts, well, maybe were thought to be temporary in the beginning. We are hearing more and more that they are here to stay. You can see the headline news here that there are at least 10 years before we'll stop seeing those types of power interruptions so our kids are outside the next slide.

So back to the food and egg industry there. I already spoke about the the impact that they make on and how important they are, but they also are experiencing increased electricity charges. So twenty five to 50 percent jumps to the electricity rates. Everybody's rates are going up, but it's really impacting the ag industry. And also farming and ag areas are usually rural communities and out at the edge of the grid. And so they're not able to get reliable power.

So concentric power steps in and is able to provide that reliable power and a renewable fashion and in and make it reliable and more affordable. These trends also show the top left is the cost of solar has come down. That's a positive. The cost of batteries are coming down. Another positive. The cost of natural gas and commodities are coming down. And then a big one is the cost of capital has been coming down. So being able to invest the capital that needed to build these types of projects, what's going up is the cost of energy that we just talked about.

So that's the problem. Next slide, the next two slides. You can kind of go quickly. But in we've already heard tonight the federal government and local government is very supportive of these goals of decarbonization, as they should be, and bringing a carbon free environment into the power sector. And we are embracing that center power. So to some more headlines about the trends and the tailwinds that are supporting what our companies out there doing next. OK, our next five.

We are local, we grew up here. I personally didn't I'm the person that was in been in the Navy for 20 years and lived in a lot of different communities. But I have been here for the last eight years and I absolutely love living here. But most of the folks that work at Concentric Power were brought up here and really are understand the core business of the ag industry and what our customers need. Next slide.

So how do we do it, we'll build the the different generation, so solar batteries for storage, wind and firm power and you bring it all together and we have a technology advantage. We have a couple of different patents for our company that is our controller. So I call it something it's going to optimize and synchronize all of those assets together and decide when to use what assets, what's the most cost effective, what's the most sustainable asset to be using at any given time and tie that microgrid all together so that you're going to get the reliable power that you need and the sustainable power to your facility and the most affordable power next. So the best way to talk about it, it'll be my last night, I guess the next one, we have many projects you can see on our website, but one project that is in the news quite a bit right now is the city of Gonzalez.

And they get all the credit for this project in that they had decided this is an industrial plant in the city of Benza. They wanted to grow and their development was hampered. And so they have decided to go it on their own and build their own microgrid to bring power to the industrial park so that their development can continue and they can realize their community goals. So concentric power is helping them build the micro grid that will distribute power to all of these users in the industrial park, not the homes and the the bedroom community side, but the industrial park side next time.

So if you want to know more about it, it's on our website and I also have my email on the next slide. But please, you know, our call to action is, well, that's not my email, but it's a thomlinson, that consensus power. If you go back one slide, Amanda, I will wrap it up. We are looking to hire, so we would love to have you reach out to join our team. We are technology driven, green solutions for renewable and reliable power.

And we pay close attention. And I ask that all of you pay close attention to the energy regulations that are helping shape our future for the better. So thank you for having me.

Sheree / VeriCool

And we hear you. Can anybody hear me OK? Yes, we can you great, perfect. Hi, everybody, my name is Sheree. I want to first off thank everybody for having us there. Always very excited about the opportunity. However, he actually got caught in Tennessee in the storm this past week and is trying to get back home to California. So he wanted to tell everybody that he is incredibly sorry and hopefully he can do this the next round.

But I do want to thank everybody for having us. Next slide, please. OK, so our first mission, very cool is people in sustainability, we focus on protecting people and the planet by reducing sorry, the use of unsustainable packaging materials, most particularly expanded polystyrene foam. Most of you might know that as Styrofoam and very committed to a diverse workforce, reducing prison recidivism and supporting those in need of a second chance. Next slide, please. So this is my amazing boss, Darryl.

He would probably kill me if he heard me say these things about him, but he is an amazing person. I am completely blessed to have met him, to say the least. So, Darryl, he actually started VeriCool in about twenty fifteen. This story is very different than anybody will probably ever come across. So Darryl is actually from Richmond, California. His life actually started off pretty rough. He wasn't given the same opportunities as others and made some mistakes.

Those mistakes actually help founded the company and is actually his drive and passion. So what he did was he likes to provide jobs for people who have taken a new path in society after incarceration. In doing so, he has given opportunities to people that I don't think would have been given them otherwise. Next slide, please. So here is a few of our amazing employees at Berrocal, and part of our corporate DNA is to fight prison recidivism. He is a huge advocate for this, not only because he experienced it firsthand, but because this is the community that he is familiar with.

And so these are people that we are used to helping. So in our first left hand corner, that is Gary Brown. Gary Brown just turned 40 one at the age of 17. He actually was incarcerated on a murder charge and he did twenty four years. He was actually sentenced to life, but he got out after being good. He probably I think there was a mistake, but I'm not a lawyer anything. He is one of the most amazing people I've ever met.

He's one of the most hardest working people. He actually started we were his first job. He started out as a production operator, which is entry level. And now he is one of our engineers making way more than that, I think, that he ever could have imagined, given his circumstances. Over to the far right, we have Roger Pacheco, another person that is also from the Bay Area. He actually was incarcerated and did five years for manslaughter charge.

Another hard, hard, hard worker. I see him every day. He's always asking me how I'm doing. He is such a pleasure to work with down in the bottom left. I don't know if you can see him. Bradstone, he was actually the CEO of Freedman's Jewelry. Bradstone also was convicted of a charge that they believe was wrong. He was they offered him three years. He said that he wouldn't take it because he wasn't guilty and they threw the book at him and gave him ten.

Now they are trying to overturn it. But you can't get those ten years back. And he does have children. So we're just we're grateful that we were able to find these amazing people and give them the opportunity to come be a part of their story next. OK, so our main goal is to basically do away with polystyrene, also known as Styrofoam, so our products are made with renewable, raw and post consumer materials. All our materials match our match or outperform EPS.

But without the harmful effects on the environment and wildlife, all materials meet composable in curbside recyclability standards. And our insulation material is nontoxic starch based and water soluble. Meaning if you have our item and you put it in a pool, you put it in a lake, it'll dissolve. It's completely biodegradable and non harmful. Next slide, please. So I'm sure as many of us in California are aware, they have been putting a ban on Styrofoam for probably the past few five years, at least five years that I know of, not only in California, but it's starting to expand now across the world in different countries.

Here is just a quick breakdown of all the different areas that it is expanding to. Although we are local, we are a small startup that is growing quite quickly as we speak right now. We currently have our headquarters in Livermore. We have another facility ran by us and New Jersey. We are in the midst of opening two more sites, one in Winston-Salem and another one in Chicago, as well as licensing out to other areas across the globe. So Germany, Singapore, so many different areas.

We're almost exploding right now. Next slide, please. Thank you. And so, of course, when we seen all these bands coming, we can only think, what can we do to help, help make make the right decision for everybody? We knew it was coming, but there was no replacement if there's no replacement. And, of course, they're going to drag their feet to make this change that we all know is needed. So that's how they're born.

Next slide, please. So in the top left, that was our first we're the first creators of a paper cooler, I'm not sure if anybody is familiar with the paper cooler. They actually seem Daryl's idea at a packaging packaging show and they commented on it. They even came down to the headquarters and discussed it with him. And then a few, I think a few months later, they dropped their own paper cooler that looked exactly like ours. So we are the first paper cooler in the industry.

On the right is actually a molded paper cooler at the bottom left. That's our flagship item. That is the very cooler place. So what it is, is if you can see inside, it's not the box is the actual packaging inside. So you'll see the way it's actually inside of a poly film. And the inside is a starch based material that biodegrades and dissolves in water. On the right hand side, it's more of a molded paper product.

So it's a fiber lined paper product. And then in the middle, we also have our mailers that we actually made specifically for U.P.S. So we have our go green mailer, which is compostable or fiber mailer, which is curbside recyclable and our recycle recyclable mailer on the right, which is probably from next slide, please. And to wrap it up as a startup and like I said, we are growing exponentially. I'm sure many of you are aware that at startups, everybody where so many hats, which is why I'm here and we would love to open up the doors to anybody that's in need, whether it's a family member, just anybody that needs this opportunity.

We are here. We're not only looking for entry level, we're looking for people that are executives. We're looking for process engineers, management, every place accounting. We are exploding quickly, if any. I guess my email is there. Please feel free to reach out to me. I am actually also the hiring manager. So I'm your first point of contact.

Next slide, please. I think that might be it. Oh, and then here's just a few awards that we have, we don't know if you may have seen our article on Forbes. That's probably one of our most seen articles. We actually did. We actually just did an NBC segment on our covid-19 chipper. So we did also create a replacement for the EPS covid-19 vaccine shipper's, unfortunately, because they didn't release the qualifications until later on that, meaning how long it needed to stay cold for as well as the degrees. We didn't get to put that out until later on in the game. So we were a little bit behind. And I think that's the last slide.

If anybody has any questions, feel free to send me an email. We are also doing another round of investment right now in case anybody's also interested in that. There will be more than happy to speak with anybody. Thank you. That was wonderful.

Claudiu Bucur / Piersica

Back to you, you're going to have to help me pronounce your name and the company name. Oh, you can read that, come on, dog Pacyga, you got it right and you got my name right, too.

So thank you. So I appreciate the invitation to share with you guys what we're trying to do, which is really a transformational way of working on developing a new type of battery, which the industry is aiming to replace the lithium ion battery with this new type of technology called a solid state battery. And I put here we are working with a bunch of partners. We have recently partnered up with the Department of Energy. They have awarded us Intrapreneurship Award for the next two years to develop our technology at Argonne National Lab.

So we're really happy that we received this type of badge of approval from from a national lab regarding our technology. Next, lightless. I'll start with the team, and the reason for this is because we're a very young company, we are we incorporated this company last year in twenty twenty, right when the zombie apocalypse started. We are a group of people that have deep industry roots. We are not an academic startup. And it may come as a benefit to the challenging the thing they were trying to achieve here.

I have worked in the lithium ion industry for for more than 15 years. I worked with the multinational OEMs we have here the chief technology officer from the largest battery company in the world, Seattle. We have lots of great talent here to try to tackle the problems that we're trying to solve. Next next slide, please. That the challenge really for commercial fishermen is that one of the challenges is that he uses flammable solvents. The electrolyte inside the battery consists of lithium salts dissolved in organic solvents, which are actually flammable.

They are very good. They burn very well. And this is mitigated by packing up the cells in battery packs, which increase costs and increase the weight of the system. So the industry is trying to to simplify things only if they had this this battery with the cell chemistry, which doesn't burn sort of sort of how that acid and nickel metal hydride batteries used to be before lithium ion. So as the cell sizes increase and the applications move towards very large batteries for the transportation sector, there is a lot of activity trying to develop batteries without this type of flammable solvents.

So this is the space that we operate in. This is the problem that we are trying to solve. Next slide, please. To get right to the point, we have three horizons based on the maturity of our technologies, the first horizon has to do with the component of the battery called the separator, which resides between the anode and cathode. This we have our proprietary material that we have developed and patented. It is a lithium conductive polymer material and we intend to license it or manufacture it under a joint agreement with the larger partner.

This is our most advanced material and Horizon two is regarding the component of the battery called the anode. We have our proprietary approach to a very high energy density, sort of a holy grail for in the world of anodes or the lithium metal anode. We think that we have a unique solution to this, which is a very process of moving from a commercial standpoint. As opposed to other more academic solutions and of course, the Horizon three is to showcase prototypes and cells based on which contain this type of our two technologies with the energy densities double to what is commercially available and in solid form, without the type of liquid electrolytes which are used commercially now, so would very much higher safety.

Next slide, please. This is sort of the mission, strategy and time line. The first horizon will take approximately two years, similar horizon, so there is a lag there because the materials and the technology involved for the first horizon is more mature. The separator material is more mature than the adult material. And then we have a nice overlap with the fellowship at Argonne National Lab to to help us develop some of these materials. We're also raising our first precede round on June 15th, as we can, Shapard notes and read on every slide we have committed about three hundred sixty K from Angels and we have a one 1000000 ceiling on a convertible note.

So there's space there for more investment, so Horizon three really would not start until 2023, of course, each of these horizons we intend to generate revenue from so we can start generating revenue independently before we get to develop the cell prototypes by sharing the technology that we have developed for the separator. And this is sort of a unique approach in the space of a solid state. Startups, typically companies focus on cell development and they do not share much technology.

Next slide, please. These are the addressable market, the our first horizon is the smallest, so we start small and we build up the separated horizon is a the market is two billion, roughly two billion dollar market, mostly market, most in every sector. The kind of material which is our second material is a six and a half billion dollar market. And the cell market overall is very large. Of course, the battery market is one hundred billion dollar market.

And we have listed some of the companies which may serve as partners or may license some of these materials from us for the separator. All of these companies on the bottom are separate our suppliers, which currently supply the legacy material analog.

Rudy Murgo / New Scale Power

Too excited to share NuScale Power with you all. Next slide, please. So just an acknowledgment disclaimer, NuScale Power is funded under a Department of Energy award, and we really greatly appreciate the Department of Energy, federal support and working with a number of federal labs to help develop our technology. Excellent. So we'll start with the statement, what is new skill trying to help solve so new skill is a nuclear technology that was trying to help facilitate the carbon free transition.

So the pie chart on the left displays the electricity generation mix currently in the United States. As you can see, coal and natural gas add up to about 60 percent of total energy generated in the course of a year. And we're trying to support the transition from that carbon based generation to a carbon free generation here in the United States and frankly, worldwide. So as you look at the pie chart on the right, that is a breakdown of the clean electricity generation.

Surprising most Americans, nuclear is already a large component of electricity generation in the United States. So new scale power has developed a new new scale power module, which is a small size. I call it a small modular reactor that generates carbon free baseload electricity, but it's also flexible. It allows us to complement renewable resources that are increasingly being deployed across the multiple electric grids here in the United States. Next slide, please. So support for this initiative comes from consumers like you and I, as well as a number of businesses, over 100 companies, influential companies around the world have committed to the area.

One hundred years, in this representative schematic here, can support that initiative by either providing energy directly to those customers or supporting those customers through power purchase agreements to provide electricity or other resources as required to help meet those carbon free needs. Next slide, please. So new skell power focuses on four main pillars smarter, cleaner, safer and cost competitive. We've reimagined the concept of nuclear power, nuclear power of our grandfathers age, if you will, was a large baseload generation well above a gigawatt in size for economics.

We have reimagined that from the ground up, focusing on safety. But it's flexible, it's simple, it's small and scalable. It's reliable. It doesn't require any external safety systems to maintain its safety component. And it will. It will. It is walkaways safe. It will shut itself down. If there is any sort of issue with operators not able to intervene, it's cleaner. It's a hundred percent carbon free baseload generation. There is no thermal generation from carbon based resources like natural gas, coal.

It is supportive because of its flexible generation profile. It's able to support wind and solar as those resources are increasingly integrated into our electric grid. It also has a very small footprint compared to traditional nuclear. Yeah, we have an emergency planning zone at the boundary fence of our roughly 40 acre plant. So it just allows for a much easier footprint within our community and the environment. It's safer. Safety was the cornerstone of the design from the original thought and intent.

So it's future proof design. It's safe without power. We've set multiple standards and we continue to do so with our technology. And it is important to many consumers around the world it's cost competitive. So this is a scalable investment. These modules can be deployed incrementally within a base size of a plant. You don't have to build the entire plant all at once so it can meet your cost competitive needs. As your community expands its need for electricity generation around the world, it is certainly competitive with natural gas, which is the most competitive power at this point.

And the fuel itself provides long term cost certainty relative to natural gas or even coal. Next slide, please. So just to represent this this energy transition currently in the United States, we have about one hundred forty five gigawatts electric of retiring coal that would equal one hundred and fifty new scale plants. Now, we recognize not every coal plant is going to be retired and replaced with baseload electricity generation. This is just a representative example. We understand that wind and solar and other technologies will help support that transition.

NuScale a bit unique, though, when you replace some technologies with wind or solar, you lose different components of what you had previously. When you replace this coal plant with a new scale plant, we're able to meet the siting needs and requirements. We can take a large proportion of the existing workforce, retrain those employees, keep them in the community, redeploy them in well-paying jobs within the nuclear plant. It also allows the preservation of local tax base, which maintains the economic benefit to those communities.

Many of you know these communities are located in remote locations. They depend on these economic generation resources for their hospitals, their schools, their fire and safety. And we're able to maintain that tax base. We're also able to utilize some of the existing infrastructure, whether it be the water and power or water needs or transmission needs, et cetera. So it's an it's an economic deployment of this technology. Next slide, please. This technology, the new skill plant, is shown here in the middle that.

Roundish thing in the middle is the nuclear power module. What you're seeing is a cutaway view of one half of what we call the reactor building. So there in this instance, there are 12 independent power modules operating and then they're independent so they can each cycle up and down producing their own thermal steam that can either produce electrons or can produce steam for other resources. Here we have it. You can produce steam heat for all the refineries or other steam uses.

You can utilize that steam for hydrogen production so you can have one module producing hydrogen when producing electricity. This can also be used for desalination. So you could pair a new scale plant producing electricity as well as clean water for a community. And again, it integrates very well with the existing carbon free intermittent resources like wind and solar. So we are helping to move that carbon decarbonization transition forward. And lastly, it's important to point out that this power with this configuration is highly reliable.

So it's able to support mission critical facilities, whether it's hospitals, schools, semiconductor fabs, which need to have absolute constant, consistent power throughout the life cycle of the production of the semiconductor cell. Next slide, please. New skill is changing the power that changes the world. Just a reminder on the final slide here for new skill, there's my name and contact information and I'm happy to take any questions or comments you may have.

Nicholas Johnson / Orange Charger

Yes, perfect. Great. Cool. Hello, my name's Nicholas, and I'm on the founders of this company called Orange Charger, and we're building an electric vehicle charging platform for multiunit properties of all types. So it's pretty clear now that the future transportation is electric. We've heard some really cool projects from flying planes to electric scooters. But to the day to day, we still have cars and they're not going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, the market is one of the fastest growing markets in the US with goals to exceed this administration.

But over the last three years, we've seen an exponential curve and sales. The problem is, if you live or a renter in a mountain dwelling, access to charging has been a major hurdle. So looking at registration data, 40 percent of people live in multiple dwellings, but only nine percent of cars, electric vehicles have been registered to those type of properties by the DMV. So our goal is to solve this problem. The other factor that we looked at out of a survey we did, which is probably a little biased because is only in California, 80 percent of people surveyed wanted electric cars and vehicle.

So the reason this is important is it scales across all major cities and has to be cost effective and easy to basically set up. And most of the market that we're after is specifically apartments, condos and archways. And we're looking at also workplace, but anywhere that a vehicle spends most of its time title. So right now, 85 percent of renters that we surveyed see there's a lack of charging. And in fact, there was an article this week that one in five people return to their car because of charging that went around in like Wall Street Journal, Forbes.

We see that as a good thing. That means that out of five people, we just need to get one to keep the car.

So some of the misconceptions with EV charging that we're trying to debunk while building our solution is that DC fast charging will solve all of our charging problems. And the reality is it won't. While it's great for road trips, it's often more expensive, requires more infrastructure that doesn't scale well for the number of people we want to drive electric cars and therefore is often putting a burden on people who don't have charging at home. So if you're stuck using DC fast charging you actually not getting the cost savings and you're also doing more damage to your vehicle, average lifespan.

So where we're for this for the fact that it's great for regifting, we don't see it as a day to day use operation. The other one is level two public charging, which is like what you might find at a target or a Whole Foods. And this doesn't solve the problem either. New York Times wrote a great article about charging dessert's and how if you own an electric vehicle and rely on public charging, you end up having to create habits that aren't really convenient to deal with public charging, such as spending an hour or two hours a week to charge your car a few times a week.

And the other side of this is it forces people to charge during peak times, which puts more strain on the grid and also drives up the cost of electricity. The other one is that everybody needs level to power to charge quickly. Reality is, most people drive less than fifty five miles a day.

So charging them nightly on like a level one outlet is more than they need for their daily drive, is more economical and scales, and also means that it cost less to install.

So we took this knowledge and we built our solution. Our platform is what we call orange right now. It's these Iot connected our Internet of Things, connected outlets that are energy grid, what our meters for each one. You can attach them to a bridge circuit and a property. They track individual usage charge the person who used it like it's kind of similar to what Bird does for their scooters and then aggregate the money back to the property owner. And then we have a small fee on top of it.

Each unit is capable of going up to four point eight kilowatts. So it's a lot less than what people think of for like eleven point two or a high power level two charger, which means we can install more of them without having to upgrade panels and therefore in many cases were five times cheaper or cost effective compared to level two auctions for multiunit dwellings of any kind. So that's workplace condos choice. Rebuilt basically a software platform around it, so mobile app and website back in that allows you to basically manage all the devices, make sure they're working, collect payment from the driver's side, see how much you're actually spending and access the data from the app that you use every day.

And, yeah, wanted to keep this short. I'm happy to answer any questions. Kind of. What we're looking for right now is pilot sites. So we've been we started in January of last year. We basically have done a few pilot sites to date with clean energy that we're doing installs this month. We passed you last month and we're looking to kind of ramp up sales. We're also looking for, you know, anybody that wants to potentially invest in our next round of funding, although we're not raising right now if you're interested.

We love to talk and kind of anybody that wants to help make charging more accessible to everyone. Thanks so much.