What Differentiates a Clean-Tech Unicorn
Bill Nussey and John Belizaire share a passion for solving the climate crisis and driving the clean energy revolution.
Their approaches differ — Bill has been dedicated to ramping up local-scale solutions like rooftop or community solar and microgrids, and John has been working with large utility-scale solar and wind projects. While they are working at different scales, the concepts they talk about have applications across the board.
Bill is the founder of the Freeing Energy Project, whose mission is to accelerate the global shift to cleaner, cheaper energy. Prior to Freeing Energy, Bill spent most of his career as a tech CEO. His first company, which he co-founded in high school, provided graphic software for early text-based personal computers. Since then, he has founded or served on the executive board of no less than five companies, which have created thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in value.
Bill’s journey into clean energy began with a TED Talk, which grew into 100+ articles and, most recently, a top ten energy podcast called The Freeing Energy Podcast. He is the author of Freeing Energy: How Innovators Are Using Local-scale Solar and Batteries to Disrupt the Global Energy Industry from the Outside In.
In this episode, Bill and John discuss renewable energy development in Africa, solutions for today’s energy grid, and his book Freeing Energy: How Innovators Are Using Local-Scale Solar and Batteries to Disrupt the Global Energy Industry from the Outside In, where he dives into the Five Orders of Clean-Tech Innovation.
John Belizaire: Bill, welcome to the show.
Bill Nussey: Hey, John. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to talk with you. Some of the things that excite me most about this industry — you guys are doing them.
John Belizaire: Bill, you and I share a passion for solving the climate crisis and driving the clean energy revolution. What I find interesting is we both have backgrounds as tech CEOs, and we both started our renewable energy careers through a connection to Africa. I’d love to hear about your background. Tell us about Africa.
Bill Nussey: I’ve been in love with the continent and many countries in Africa for years. Back in the ancient days in one of my early software companies, South Africa was actually our second-largest market outside the United States, and I had the chance to go there a couple of times back when it was a very different country. So I’ve always been in love with the place, and when I had the opportunity to take my family, we visited, did the things that you do, went to some safaris and some resorts, camps I should say, but we also wanted to go and meet some people who live very, very different lives than we do. We wanted our children to meet some other children. I remember we were sitting in a mud hut with a mother who was a part of a Samburu tribe. We were sitting in her hut with a translator and my family, and she was explaining how she took care of the food for her family.
As we’re sitting there, the only light is this fire burning in the center of the hut, and after 30 seconds, 60 seconds, my eyes, and my throat are starting to burn. I ask her, “How do you deal with this?” And she says, “We don’t really have any choice. We just got used to it.” It flashed in my head, as an entrepreneur, and as a tech person, that there has to be a better answer. That really sparked the beginning of the search for better energy. That led me to realize that the entire energy system is outdated and in dire need of an upgrade, beyond that poor woman in Africa.
John Belizaire: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. How long ago was that?
Bill Nussey: I started going to Africa in the ’80s, South Africa, but that particular trip was in 2015.
John Belizaire: Take us through your journey over the last several years.
[3:50] What do you see as the big challenges related to the grid, here in the U.S. and beyond?
Bill Nussey: I’ve been a tech CEO my whole life, and had some good fortune along the way. A company that I had run for a while called Silverpop was acquired by IBM and it became IBM’s marketing cloud. I wasn’t really sure what to do with myself inside of IBM, so I wrote a letter to the CEO, Ginni, and expounded on how IBM could really do so many more things with the assets and the history they had. And three months later, I was running strategy for her, for the company, and for the SVPs. That was crazy interesting, looking at a company with that much history. One of the projects that we were doing was to launch the IoT division and look at all the industries where digitization had been waning, and up bubbles the power industry.
I had gotten a double E degree a million years before. So I was fascinated, zooming in on the lack of digitization for the electric grid. It was just one of many industries, but one day I caught an article that changed everything about my life. I think it was a New York Times article. It said, “In the future, solar power is going to be cheaper than coal and natural gas. And that’s coming soon.” I said, “No way.” I started doing the research, I was tearing apart articles, and I actually found a scientist (who I ended up starting a company with later) to help explain to me the economics. And sure enough, solar was on track to become the cheapest way to generate electricity, or energy, in the history of humanity.
It has since reached that threshold and now continues to pull ahead of every other source of electricity, including wind. So that was a catalyst for me to say, “This is the biggest disruption in the history of business.” It’s bigger than the internet. It’s bigger than telecom and mobile phones, because it’s going into an existing $2, $3 trillion global industry, and it’s turning it upside down. And I love a good disruption. That’s been my whole career, being a part of various disruptions. I had to get into it. So I was driving my friends and my wife crazy, “Hey, I want to get into this space but I’m at IBM, I can’t really leave.” And a buddy of mine calls me up one night and says, “Hey, I know what you need to do. You need to quit IBM and write a book.” “A book?” “You can interview the smartest people in the world and ask them the dumbest questions.”
If he’d been a little more prescient he would’ve said, “Start a podcast,” but the book was the medium of trade. So, a couple of months later I resigned and started working on the book. My first interview was with Amory Lovins, who has always been a big hero of mine and sort of the godfather of small-scale energy. And I was off. I was supposed to take a year to write the book, but I was having too much fun, and learning too much, and the problems seemed to be even larger and more entwined than I could have imagined, as I kept pulling on the threads of discovery. Eventually, many years later than planned, the book came out late last year, and now I’m on a mission with the podcast, the articles, and the book to get people excited, aware, and educated — particularly innovators and entrepreneurs — that there is a really widely invisible but much faster path to a clean energy future than people get their heads around.
John Belizaire: Tell us three big challenges you think the grid has right now.
[7:17] What are the three big challenges the grid has right now?
Bill Nussey: The grid has been more broken than people realize. The week of the multi-day outage in Texas a year ago, the constant outages in California, the outages in Louisiana, despite New Orleans having built up a giant natural gas plant to prevent outages…I think the world is realizing that the grid is out of date and needs some major changes.
The other thing is that the grid is fundamentally inequitable. That woman in Kenya is a good example, but even in the United States, half the people don’t have a FICO score that allows them to put solar up, or even get access to community solar. Yet it’s a cheaper option for them if they could access it. They would actually save money. So there’s a broad opportunity to close the equity gap and make the lower cost, cleaner energy available to everybody. Those are a couple of the reasons I think the urgency is more than just climate change. Climate change is perhaps the biggest urgency, but there are other reasons to lean into a better grid. But it’s facing, as everybody who follows energy space knows, huge challenges to make the strides that it should be making.
John Belizaire: I can relate to that perspective, Bill, going back to Africa. We started our project working in renewables in Morocco. While I was there, I learned a lot about energy infrastructure on the continent and energy in general and lack thereof, right? There are billions of people on the continent that don’t have access to reliable electricity, to your point. They’re producing heat and light in ways that they shouldn’t in this day and age, and it’s because there’s just no infrastructure there to support them. That’s what I found really exciting about the opportunity to find innovative ways to bring more green energy and look at interesting things happening in the energy space as a way to drive the transition. I was intrigued by this section in your book that talks about super cheap excess electricity because it’s part and parcel of what we’re doing. There are a lot of parallels between what we’re doing and what you’re passionate about. Can you explain to our listeners what that section and what that term means?
What are you talking about when you talk about excess energy in your book?
Bill Nussey: When I wrote that section, I didn’t know you guys existed. And when our mutual friends connected us, I was reading all about you guys. It’s amazing that you have the vision and the support to build a business leaning into this because you’re arguably a little ahead of your time, but boy, oh boy is the market playing in your favor. People in the energy industry, in the electricity industry, are aware that the electricity in California gets upside down a couple of days a year and the price goes negative, so they say, and that forces them to sell the excess electricity into Arizona in that case. But that’s the tiny, tiny tip of the iceberg in terms of a trend towards excess electricity.
I have a quote in my book from Michael Liebreich, who’s one of the real visionaries in space. He said, “Overbuilding in excess electricity isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.” Most people see it as a problem, but not for the same reason the utilities do; the utilities see it as a problem because they have to curtail it. Very often they own the power plants and they have to turn them off because if you put too much electricity on the grid and there are not enough people to use it, it actually causes blackouts. It’s the opposite of the problem most people understand. So what do you do with this electricity? It’s not just the existing systems; today the percentage penetration of solar and wind is relatively small. That percentage is going to go to 20, 30, 50, 60, 70, 80, and eventually a hundred percent, but it’s going to be 50% before we know it.
That’s going to create that problem that happens in California to a much larger degree. That’s still just the first inning because as these 20-year financing agreements are paid off on solar panels and wind (in the case of solar panels with an average life of 32 years on utility-scale projects), you’re going to have at least a dozen years where all the electricity generated is marginally close to zero cost. So, that’s going to lower the average cost even further. Then, the people that are building the very large-scale systems are overbuilding so they can maximize the windows and the contracts they have to squeeze every dollar they can. We are about to enter a flood of excess electricity.
I knew that this wasn’t a bug; this was a feature. So I started looking and interviewing experts: what do you do with all this excess electricity? And most people say, “Hey, this is terrible. It’s a problem. What are we going to do?” There’s a whole book called Taming the Sun, which is a really good book, but he paints this problem entirely in negative terms, instead of in terms of an opportunity. It’s a really good book. You should read it. Incredibly thoughtful. The guy’s an expert.
Batteries are the obvious answer. People say, “Well, listen, we’ll just take the excess electricity and we’ll stick it into batteries and use it at night.” That’s a decent solution, but batteries are expensive. And it’s a singular solution. What I theorized in the book is that there are at least seven really big opportunities to use the electricity. Utilities and policymakers are saying, “Oh, this excess electricity is a problem.” When in human history has anyone ever said too much energy is a problem, right?
The first one that I think is a perfect match is carbon capture. Right now it’s difficult to make the economics of direct air and other carbon capture work, but as this abundance of excess electricity at a low cost becomes available, that’s going to drive it. Desalinization. Then one of the early ones, some of the stuff that Google has written about it, and you guys are doing this, which is incredible: data centers.
Like the electricity consumption or the bandwidth on the internet, the actual need for computation varies throughout the day. As people get on their phones in the morning and evenings, that actually causes more electricity to be consumed, but there’s a huge amount of data processing that can happen at any time. Google has a great white paper on how much money they saved in their data centers by simply shifting those, what you guys call batchable loads, to the timeframes when the cheapest renewable energy is available. It’s like a one plus one equals five combinations. But there are others: indoor agriculture benefits, and it tends to be when the sun is the brightest you need the most air conditioning, so it’s a good correlation. Creating fertilizer, very energy intensive. Of course, creating hydrogen and other synthetic fuels.
That’s maybe going to be the biggest of all in the long term. But then, even today, I was reading and thinking about my call with you today, Rocky Mountain Institute, or RMI now, just put out a paper about putting EV charging into office buildings rather than at homes and shifting the incentives for people to charge their cars in the office, because that’s when the solar is the brightest. That’s when we’re going to have excess electricity. So if you just incentivize as an office building or as an employer, and when your EV drivers are parked in the parking lot, make it really easy for them to use the electricity that’s being generated in excess on the grid, you actually correlate EV charging with the excess electricity.
This is listed as one of my five largest multi-billion dollar opportunities, this excess electricity, and I’ve presented this to McKinsey and several other esteemed big thinkers, and I always get the, “Wait, that’s really interesting” and “I haven’t heard about that.” So I think it’s a really great idea. I’m excited that you guys are already working on that business.
John Belizaire: So what you just went through — those seven or eight examples — are kind of the options for what you can do with this excess energy as we’re looking at innovations to drive the transition.
Is that the list that sort of matches the five orders of cleantech innovation, or is that something else from the book?
Bill Nussey: That’s a good question. When I was looking at all of these companies, there are 50 opportunities in the book that are all multiple billions of dollars a year, or will be. I was talking to venture capitalists and investors, and it became clear to me that a lot of these investors, particularly if you go back to 2011 and what I call the cleanpocalypse in the early round of venture investments in cleantech, all cratered basically. There was very little hard assessment on how to segment the different parts of the supply and value chain. I was surprised.
I looked and looked and went to McKinsey and BCG and all the smart places, and I couldn’t find it. So I made one up because I’ve been a professional strategist for many different ways over my career. I call it the five orders. It really represents the value chain of starting with components all the way up through the highest value disruption, the fifth order. So all these ideas that I’ve talked about are probably third or fourth-order. Probably mostly third-order ideas, where you typically have to own assets, and you’re trying to maximize the costs through clever business models and technical designs. So most of these are third order.
[17:07] When you look at new unicorn startups or technologies that you’ve seen come out recently, what are the ones that are the most inspiring to you out there?
Bill Nussey: I get really excited about companies that are using creative marketing and finance to basically democratize energy. Those are the ones that get me most excited on a personal level. That takes place in the U.S. The Department of Energy is doing an amazing job of helping create a dialogue around energy equity and renewable energy equity in the United States. I spend a lot of time with people in Africa looking at how we can accelerate the penetration of these smaller-scale systems and even the mid-scale systems. As an investor, the parts that excite me the most are what would be fourth-order businesses using that model, which is where you don’t necessarily need to own the assets, but you’re organizing how the assets are utilized and facilitating markets for them to monetize those assets.
The best example of a fourth-order market outside the energy space would be Apple’s App Store. Apple just has to put up a website and let you download some stuff, but they get 30%, somewhat controversially, for everything they sell. That’s incredibly profitable for them. Spotify, right? They’re creating a marketplace for people to sell what they want to sell, but they get essentially rents. In the energy space, you can look at V2G, vehicle to grid technologies, you can look at virtual power plants, and all kinds of aggregation. There’s a new ruling from the federal group that oversees the grid called FERC 2222, which is really paving the way, from a policy point of view to a large scale, to facilitate creative fourth-order businesses in my view. Those are the ones where I think you’re going to see the fastest growth, and the highest profits, and frankly, they will attract the most entrepreneurs. Some of the most talented people will gravitate towards these ideas where you’re not encumbered as much by the capital intensity that most early-stage renewable companies have to deal with.
Do you guys own the data center assets that you deploy for your customers?
John Belizaire: We are an asset owner. So what we do is we go to these other asset owners, folks who actually own the power generation facilities, that are experiencing this excess energy problem. I like to say I drive up with my little truck with the Soluna logo on the side and say, “Hey, I notice those turbines aren’t spinning very much over there.” You know, “What’s that about?” He says, “Well, the grid won’t let us put our energy over there.” And I said, “Well if you give me that acreage right there, I’ll build a facility that will virtually eliminate this problem for you.” And then we put a physical design, and a structure, and analyze their real-time data for the last four years in something we call the curtailment assessment. Then we design, build, and operate the facility. So we build a full-scale modular design, our buildings aren’t these big monolithic facilities that Google or Facebook would build. We actually build smaller modular units that still sit on concrete so they are actual buildings. Then we glue them together almost like Lego blocks. So we can build very large facilities using these modular designs.
Bill Nussey: Love that metaphor.
John Belizaire: And then we designed them so that they have a highly efficient conversion of electrons to computing. That means we’ve designed the cooling using an air-based design, so we move large volumes of air through the building to keep the temperature down to ambient level. We have a very flexible electrical design that allows us to build utility-scale facilities to address this wasted energy issue, and then convert it into a form that is globally transportable, that’s completely distributed so we can do everything from crypto mining to these other batchable processes. We own everything, from the electrical elements that connect to the power plant all the way to the actual machines that do the computing in the building. We basically offer that as a resource, both to ourselves in the crypto mining space, and eventually to enterprises in the batchable computing space.
Bill Nussey: You would absolutely be a third-order system, unequivocally, because you are selling assets that you own as a service.
That is one of the clearer fits in the five order model. The fourth-order you inevitably will do as your market grows. Someone’s going to look at a whole raft of companies all competing in a similar space that you’re in because it’s an exciting space and they’re going to traffic cop it. That would become a fourth-order business.
John Belizaire: Sort of sitting on top and allowing folks to shop for the best price or best computing availability across these green data centers?
Bill Nussey: Yes.
John Belizaire: Fascinating.
Bill Nussey: And you guys are co-locating with the facility, with the solar and wind farm, correct?
John Belizaire: Yeah. We’re behind the meter. Yes.
Bill Nussey: Excellent. Excellent. Because I’ve been in software for 30 years, I have to ask you a software nerd question. Are you guys using GPUs or using low-power ARM chips? What kind of computation engines do you put in your containers?
John Belizaire: Good question. For crypto, we’re using ASIC-based machines, so a single purpose. Then in our phase two business, the buildings will be filled with GPUs.
Bill Nussey: GPUs. Okay.
John Belizaire: We build a software layer on top of that to manage and facilitate the building. Then another software layer on top of that to manage and schedule the jobs that people will have us run for them across our fleet of facilities around the world.
Bill Nussey: I was nerding out this morning, watching a video on Apple’s new M1 Ultra chip. It has unprecedented computing efficiency per watt. It’s too bad you can’t buy it, they won’t sell you any, I don’t think, but boy, talk about squeezing every bit of computation from a kilowatt.
John Belizaire: You’re right. It actually popped up on our company Slack today and fired up all sorts of imaginative conversation around it. It’s like “I wish we could build custom-built machines around these things.”
Bill Nussey: But that’s what I love about your business, John; these trends are all playing to your favor. You’re out there basically realizing that there’s a hot area where people are going to want to build apartment buildings, but no one realizes, so you buy the acreage, then you wait for everyone to realize that’s a hot region in a city. Then you sell the acreage to people who are going to build apartment buildings and retail. So you’re basically out there building relationships with people before everyone knows that this is an exciting market. Once you have that container there, those containers, you can put any computation engines in there that you want as long as it fits with the market needs. If it turns out it's 10 times cheaper in three or four years, well, you can replace it and you just make more money.
John Belizaire: That’s right. Man, I’m going to take this snippet and I’m going to send it to our investors. What I’ve been saying is that we are essentially building a flexible platform that’s integrated with green electrons that helps to shift to where computing is headed. Computing is an ever-evolving space, and the computer fabric that you use is ever-evolving. We’ve built a flexible platform that allows us to participate in that evolution over time. In fact, we’re consciously planning to evolve the company over time.
I want to talk about your TED Talk, Bill. You did one in 2017 that was about accelerating the shift to clean energy and framing local energy as a solution. You’ve talked about the democratization of energy, and in the talk, you discussed ways to make the grid cleaner, more secure for cyber attacks (which as you imagine today is an important aspect), and more cost-effective. Five, six years later what developments have changed this space? If you had to give the talk again this year, what would you say differently this time? What would your talk be about?
[25:38] If you gave a TED Talk this year, what would your talk be about?
Bill Nussey: That’s a really good question. Let me give it thought for a second, but immediately I think I would be really enthused by how far the price of solar and batteries has actually dropped. I don’t think anybody, even the most optimistic line graph drawers, five years ago would have predicted that their optimistic graphs would be true. And they are. We’ve seen a slight uptake in solar because of some supply chain issues in the last three months, but that’s a blip. Generally, the price has exceeded almost everybody’s expectations, and that’s one of the reasons that solar has become the predominant default way to build green energy systems now, even really leaving wind behind. The other thing that I didn’t see coming was the degree of resistance that utilities would mount. And I didn’t see the ways in which they would mount that resistance.
I didn’t think they would get away with it if they tried it, but they are. I always hesitate to say things like this because I think utilities are necessary. I’ve met many, many utility executives, and not one of them is a bad person, at least not upon meeting them briefly. I think the institution called the regulated monopoly is fundamentally flawed and outdated and utilities are doing what we basically told them to do, which is maximize their profits. They’re doing some things that wouldn’t hold up well if they were widely known by the public. Just yesterday, the governor of Florida signed into law a bill that undercuts the value that small scale solar gets paid when they send their excess electricity back in the grid, which is obviously an opportunity for you guys and people doing what you’re doing, on the small scale at least.
According to what I’ve read, and it seems relatively well-researched, that bill was actually written by Florida’s utilities. It wasn’t something the legislators came up with because they thought that their citizens wanted it. In fact, according to some pretty credible polls, 85% of the people in Florida, including a lot of people of all political stripes, feel strongly that not only should you be able to have rooftop solar, but you should get compensated fairly for it. So despite overwhelming public support and legislators who clearly don’t have strong opinions, because they’re deferring to the sole beneficiary, the utility, and they’re letting them write the bill, right? I wouldn’t have imagined five years ago that this could have come out, happened, and gotten passed. Now the rooftop solar, commercial solar, and the State of Florida is set back five or six years. It’s really a shame.
John Belizaire: It really is a shame. The concept of community solar or distributed generation is a great solution for the grid. Having a law of frameworks that basically prevents that innovation from taking place makes no sense whatsoever.
Bill Nussey: I don’t know if Soluna will be the folks that solve it, but if the state of Florida is only going to give me a couple of cents for my extra kilowatt, then I’m hoping you guys or others will come to these folks and say, “Listen, here’s this model. We can put this inexpensive box in your garage next to your solar inverter or whatever we do, and we’re going to pay you twice as much as the utility will pay you for the extra kilowatt-hour.” You’ll make a fortune and no one will care about Florida’s now lousy net metering law.
That is what the utilities I think are missing entirely. I’ve attempted to talk to a few of the leaders about it and I don’t think that they’re receptive yet. All they’re doing is creating a business opportunity for Soluna. They’re creating incentives for people to put batteries up. By making it difficult to get fairly compensated for excess rooftop solar, all they’re doing is hastening the speed at which the utility becomes less relevant.
It’s an irony that I think is lost on everybody. But unfortunately, it means the utilities are going to be demoted to a less important role in the future that’s absolutely not necessary. But that’s exactly what AT&T did when they were fighting to give up the monopoly. It’s exactly what so many other industries have done. They fight for the status quo and by doing so, they cement themselves into irrelevance as innovators. Companies like you and others, come in and say, “Well, there is a better answer. Thanks for making us more financially attractive.”
John Belizaire: That’s well said. Very often it’s an innovator’s dilemma, right? It’s hard for them to see a path forward for a new initiative or a new innovation that requires them to destroy their own business.
Bill Nussey: My favorite book, it’s been my sort of guidebook for my whole career.
John Belizaire: Yeah. It’s so true. Let’s talk about your podcast, Freeing Energy. You’ve had a number of guests on the show.
[30:27] I’d love to hear who’s your favorite guest so far and why?
Bill Nussey: That’s a completely unfair question.
John Belizaire: Like who’s my favorite child?
Bill Nussey: Yes, exactly. So many conversations are so different. So the official answer is my favorite guest is always the one I interviewed last.
These people are so inspiring and fascinating. I think Michael Liebreich, the founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and now Liebreich and Associates. One of the smartest people to walk the earth in energy. He was so clever and funny, and we did the big or go home. We went through geothermal and fusion and he had these incredibly data-heavy insights into all these different energy sources. I’m going to be interviewing Amory Lovins, who’s been my hero from the beginning of this journey since I saw him do a TED Talk 15 years ago. I’m interviewing him next week. That has a good shot at being my favorite. He is so funny and creative and brilliant beyond measure.
The last person I interviewed was Gaby Herculano, who’s part of an exchange-traded fund out of London called iClima. If you believe that local energy, the Sunruns, and the Powerwalls, and all these companies in technology, have legs, she’s got an ETF that is focused exclusively on local energy. They call it Smart Energy. So for people who aren’t investors and who aren’t entrepreneurs, but want to ride the financial wave that’s coming in this, this is probably one of the few opportunities. I’m sure she’ll have many competitors, but she saw it early on with her partner Shaila. Her story was amazing. Personally and the businesses are great. So that was the one I just interviewed two days ago. Currently, that would be my favorite.
John Belizaire: Bill, we’re going to shift to our lightning round. It’s where I ask you a couple of fun questions I always ask our guests.
What’s your favorite news outlet? Where do you get your news?
Bill Nussey: I read probably 15 things a day. I have to tell you that my favorite that I go to is PV Magazine. They’re the largest and their name suggests they’re just about solar, but they cover all types of clean energy. Batteries, geothermal, hydrogen. So they’re a really broad base and they have a huge footprint in Europe, but I believe they’re the largest medium, but there are so many great ones–CleanTechnica, Canary Media. And of course the podcasts, SunCast is great. There are many, many great podcasts. But PV Magazine’s probably my first place to go.
John Belizaire: How about predictions for the next year? We’re recording in early March of 2022. And lots of interesting things are happening in the world. Some of them are exciting, some of them sad. What is your prediction?
What would you love to see come true this year?
Bill Nussey: You think about that restaurant that all your friends keep telling you to go to. And it’s a great price and fantastic food, perfect ambiance, but it’s a little far away so you’ve never gone. But you know if you go you’re going to love it. And finally, something triggers you. You’re going to be in that part of town. You go, and you love the restaurant. It becomes your favorite restaurant. You don’t know how you ever lived without going there every week. Well, that is exactly where renewable energy is.
John Belizaire: That’s cool.
Bill Nussey: What we haven’t had is a trigger for people to break from the convenience and convention of fossil fuels and the big grid. As tragic as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is, it is that catalyst that is causing the world to say, “Wait a minute, this fossil fuel thing is not just about climate change. This is actually a geopolitical nightmare. And we can never let the security of Germany, the security of Europe, be threatened like this again, from an energy point of view.”
So I’ve just published an article, basically saying that Vladimir Putin may have done more to accelerate the shift to clean energy than all the speeches and marches at COP26. As sad and tragic as that is. But I think that’s how we’ll look back at it a year from now, John. Here we are, in mid-March 2022, at the beginning of one of the most catalyzing periods of transition towards clean energy that’s happened since solar was invented.
John Belizaire: Indeed.
What is your one-line response when you hear the word crypto?
Bill Nussey: Blackberry.
John Belizaire: Blackberry? Please elaborate.
Bill Nussey: Crypto as a concept is so broad as to be useless. It’s like cloud computing was 15 years ago. And it’s in its early stages. And generally, there are some really great things that’ll come out of it. But when it finally hits its stride, we’ll look back, just like people that use Samsung and iPhones today, and we’ll chuckle that we actually used a Blackberry. We thought the Blackberry was the solution. We thought that was the state of the art and how silly it seems in hindsight — how slow and expensive and awkward. So much of what people think about as crypto today, I think will be quaint in five years and it’ll have manifested itself in ways that the consensus and the hype today is probably missing.
John Belizaire: Yeah. Thank you so much, Bill. This has been a fantastic time with you today. I’ve learned so much. Looks like I’m going to spend a lot of time on your blog and all of your writings. So I really appreciate it very much.
Bill Nussey: Well, John, it’s been a pleasure. I’m excited to have learned about what you guys do. I think you’re in a great spot. It’s a pleasure to meet you personally, and I’m sure that we have many more conversations to come.
Over 1,000 investors, power plant owners, and clean energy leaders agree…
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“The Best Bitcoin Mining Investment” — Seeking Alpha
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